by Jane Haddam
“I thought it disappeared because it was full of fugu,” Bennis said.
“Why would anyone bother?” Gregor asked. “We all assumed there was fugu, or some other poison, in the pate. Why get rid of it? Unless there wasn’t any, of course.”
“There were traces of fugu in the statue’s head,” Bennis pointed out. “It was in one of those lab reports Sister what’s-her-name got from her cousin.”
“Rub a little fugu on the inside of the statue’s head when nobody’s looking, which shouldn’t be hard because Sister Joan Esther is dying and half an international Order of nuns are being shocked out of their minds. Mother Mary Bellarmine simply picked up the ball of chicken liver pâté and chucked it someplace, outside probably, in that little brook or under some shrubbery where she could grind it into the dirt. And she was the only one who could have done that, by the way. She was the only one close enough to the table.”
“But where was the fugu?” Bennis asked. “What did Sister Joan Esther eat?”
“A cracker she thought had chicken liver pâté on it,” Gregor said. “A cracker Mother Mary Bellarmine had made up and stashed in the basement before the reception started. Because of the smell.”
“Smell?”
“It’s May,” Gregor pointed out “It’s hot. While I was discussing all this with the Archbishop, I kept thinking that we might never have been able to pin it on her at all if the weather had been colder, because if it had she could have made up the fugu on the cracker and either kept it on her or kept it somewhere convenient, like hidden on a windowsill off one of the reception room windows. But she couldn’t, you see, because the fugu would go bad in the heat and go bad very quickly. She had to keep it someplace cool. And the most obvious place to keep something cool is—”
“In a refrigerator, and there was a refrigerator in the basement. But Gregor,” Bennis said, “you just told me how the fugu couldn’t have been in the chicken liver pâté because Mother Mary Bellarmine wouldn’t have had time with Sister Agnes Bernadette and whoever else running around the kitchen—”
“Yes, I know, it would have taken too much time. But think what actually did happen. First, Nancy Hare came storming into the foyer with a vase of roses and poured the contents all over Mother Mary Bellarmine’s head. Then Mother Mary Bellarmine went downstairs to change and—”
Bennis sat up straight. “Took forever. That’s it. She took forever. She waited.”
“Exactly,” Gregor said. “By the time she came back up again, all dressed and ready to go, everyone was chomping at the bit. The Sisters who were supposed to carry the statues in were all lined up and waiting at the door—”
“And that’s another reason she couldn’t have put the fugu in the pate,” Bennis said. “It was too late. She did take an awfully long time getting dressed.”
“She had to wait for the kitchen to be mostly clear. And she gave herself an out, after all. Her habit was torn, stained, a mess.”
“About her habit…” Bennis said.
Gregor held up his empty coffee cup. Bennis refilled it. “She stole a little extra plant food from one of the landscaping sheds and put it in the bottom of each of the vases. When the police began looking through all of them they found plant food on the bottoms, thick as grit. That ensured stains. She stole an X-Acto knife from Sister Domenica Anne, to make sure her habit got ripped enough to cause a major disaster. She didn’t want Reverend Mother General to deliver one of her patented pronouncements on ‘you look all right for the moment, let’s get on with it.’ She did all of this on Saturday, the day before, so she didn’t have to be running around—What’s the matter?”
Bennis shivered. “She’s a cold woman,” she said. “Doesn’t she make your skin crawl?”
“People who kill people always make my skin crawl. And don’t start singing. My point here is that practically everything that seemed like a carefully crafted plot was nothing of the sort. The woman didn’t use a rapier. She used a bludgeon. She just made It look like she was using a rapier.”
“But what about Nancy Hare? How could she know Nancy Hare would dump that vase of roses on her?”
“She knew because she asked Nancy Hare to do it.”
“What?”
Gregor shook his head. “Nancy Hare is the kind of person Lida is always saying ‘needs professional help.’ I’m just not too sure what kind of professional. Nancy Hare’s entire life is driving Henry Hare crazy, and especially driving him crazy in ways that interfere with his work because she hates his work. Mother Mary Bellarmine told Nancy Hare—this is according to Nancy Hare—that she was on the trail of someone who was making financial graft out of the field house project, and she needed a diversion created to allow her to search this man’s car—”
“Norman Kevic,” Bennis said automatically.
“Exactly. Norman Kevic. Nancy saw a way to get at Henry in the process and agreed. That was Saturday. She’d worked herself into a proper frenzy by the time we saw her Sunday. Then, when Sister Joan Esther died, Mother Mary Bellarmine pointed out the obvious—which is that Nancy has a very bad record, that it was Nancy and only Nancy who was seen making a huge fuss at the reception, that Nancy hadn’t actually gone home when she was supposed to but hung around a few moments, I saw her and so did one of the nuns, briefly, and on and on in a way that made it seem as if the most likely suspect was going to be Nancy Hare. And given Jack Androcetti, that constituted a threat. That’s why Nancy agreed to let Mother Mary Bellarmine ‘deck’ her, as she put it, the day after, when I wanted to talk to her. The idea was to create enough of a diversion so I wouldn’t get to talk to her.”
“What about the X-Acto knife? Did Mother Mary Bellarmine really mean to kill her?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “Certainly not then. Certainly not with an X-Acto knife. As to later—” He shrugged. “Who knows? At this point I don’t have to know.”
Bennis had brought her copy of the Inquirer into the kitchen with her. Now she picked it up. “Food poisoning,” she said, pointing to the headline. “This says food poisoning. Not murder.”
“I know,” Gregor said.
“Well?”
Gregor sat back in his chair. “Well, Bennis,” he said, “sometimes you go by the book and sometimes you do what works. Do you know what I mean?”
“No.”
“The first thing we wanted to do was to make sure Mother Mary Bellarmine got put away, right?”
“Right.”
“The Order has a rest home—an insane asylum, really—that they run up in New Hampshire. They’ve made her a deal she can’t refuse. She’s committed herself voluntarily. Next week, someone will commit her involuntarily. Reverend Mother General will take care of the rest, and when she retires, there won’t be a Sister in the Order eligible for her position who won’t know the whole story. So far so good, yes?”
“Okay.” Bennis sounded dubious.
“It’s a method that has the added virtue of not making a group of very remarkable women who do very necessary work look any worse than they have to. It’s not the fault of anyone now in charge of the Sisters of Divine Grace that once long ago some formation team made a mistake in letting Mother Mary Bellarmine through, or that in the 1950s it seemed more important that Mother Mary Bellarmine was good at finances but not good at personal relations. Things change. People change. Times change. I like the nuns.”
“I like the nuns, too. What about Jack Androcetti?”
“The Cardinal Archbishop is having a little chat with the town of Radnor.”
“What about Nancy Hare?”
“She’s talked Henry into going to a sex therapist in New York City.”
“What about Rob Collins?”
“He ought to be out of uniform in a month and a half—Bennis, what’s all that noise?”
“Noise.” Bennis Hannaford leaped to her feet. “Oh. I almost forgot. Now, look, Gregor, be reasonable. I mean, it’s no day to get upset.”
“What are you ta
lking about?”
3
WHAT SHE WAS TALKING about was very quickly clear. His front door popped open. His tiny entry foyer was filled with people. More people spilled through his front door and into his living room and his kitchen and his hall and probably his bedroom. At the front of this group of people was Hannah Krekorian, theoretically the party girl, with a big white orchid corsage on her chest.
“Krekor!” Hannah said gaily. “We surprised you!”
“Bennis,” Gregor said.
“Now, Gregor—”
“It’s not my birthday,” Gregor said.
“You won’t tell anybody your birthday,” Lida said. “We had to make it up.”
“You had a surprise party for me last month,” Gregor said.
“The theory is, if we drive you crazy enough, you’ll have to tell us,” Bennis said.
Father Tibor came up and wagged his finger in the air. “If you had not stolen your baptismal certificate we would know, Krekor. That was not an honest thing to do.”
“It was a matter of self-preservation,” Gregor said grimly.
And it might have been, but it didn’t matter, because Sheila Kashinian had just come through the door with a ten-tiered cake that looked like something once bound for a wedding and now afflicted with multiple personality disorder. It had blue-and-white icing and a little statue of a nun on the top layer and then different colors and different statues all the way down.
“It’s to celebrate your cases,” Howard Kashinian said with immense satisfaction, and Gregor considered the fact that, Howard being Howard, this was exactly the kind of thing he’d get satisfaction from.
Sheila put the cake down on the kitchen table and stood back to admire her creation.
“Now,” old George Tekemanian said. “We will sing. Krekor very much likes to hear us sing.”
It was a crock, but Gregor couldn’t very well say so.
They might be driving him crazy, but they surely meant well.
Maybe next month he could stow away on a tramp steamer and not be found again until Christmas.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries
Prologue
A Hot Night in the Middle of May
1
THERE WAS A BANNER over the masthead of the New York Sentinel that night, a banner in red letters that read,
YOU COULD BE NEW YORK’S LUCKIEST FATHER! WIN $100,000 FOR FATHER’S DAY.
Under the masthead, there was a picture of the president of the United States and the word SMASHED in thick black letters. Dr. Michael Pride didn’t know what the president of the United States had done to deserve the headline, but, he thought, coming down the stairs from the third floor at a run, leaning over to pick the paper off the floor and throw it in a garbage can, the president deserved it a hell of a lot less than the people he was now about to see. Dr. Michael Pride felt that way about a lot of the headlines the Sentinel stuck next to the president of the United States, but he wasn’t a political man and he wasn’t going to complain about it. It wouldn’t have done any good. The Sentinel was owned—as this clinic was to a large part financed—by good old Charlie van Straadt, the Citizen Kane of his time. Charlie van Straadt liked two-hundred-foot luxury yachts, one-hundred-room apartments in Trump Tower, and conspicuous charity. He also liked Republicans of the Neanderthal variety. This president was a Democrat and a disaster by definition. But Michael had more important things to think about.
There was a copy of the New York Post on a molded-plastic folding chair in the corridor as Michael headed for the back of the building and the stairs that led down to the emergency-room door. The headline said, CAUGHT and the picture underneath it was of Michael himself. It had been taken two days ago and showed Michael being led to a police car in handcuffs with a group of men who looked as if they could provide a pictorial definition of the word degenerate. Behind them, the neon storefront of the place they’d all been in when it was raided said, HOT BUNS HOT BUNS HOT BUNS.
Everything in New York takes place in capital letters, Michael thought, and then he was into it, at the bottom of the stairs, in the middle of the action. It was a Saturday night with a difference.
Actually, it wasn’t even Saturday night, not technically. It was six o’clock in the evening and still more than a little light. It had been an unseasonably hot day and the heat was lingering. Michael was reminded of the first long summer he had spent in the city. He had been an intern at Columbia Presbyterian. He had been able to afford neither the time nor the money for air-conditioned rooms. He had spent a lot of time sitting on fire escapes, letting the sweat trickle down his neck and dreaming about being a rich-and-famous specialist, with a big house in Connecticut and an apartment off Fifth Avenue and a portfolio full of real estate deals for the Internal Revenue Service to worry about.
He could have been a rich-and-famous specialist.
That was one of the things everyone agreed about, even papers like the New York Post. He could have been someplace else. But he wasn’t.
He was standing in the middle of the small emergency room of the Sojourner Truth Health Center, which he had founded, just off Lenox Avenue in Harlem. He was standing knee-deep in bleeding teenage boys and frazzled nuns. He was wondering how he was going to get through it all this time. Every once in a while, he caught one of the boys staring at him, proof positive that the pundits were all wrong. These kids could read just fine if they had something that interested them to read. Michael would stand back and the kid would look away, ashamed. Ashamed of what? HOT BUNS HOT BUNS HOT BUNS. Michael saw little Sister Margarita Rose going by with a tray of instruments and grabbed her by the wide end of her sleeve. Sister Margarita Rose came to an abrupt and panicked stop and only relaxed when she saw who had hold of her. She wasn’t going to last long, Michael thought. She’d only been here since the first of the year, and he wouldn’t give her another three full months.
“Oh,” she said, when she saw who was holding her. “Oh, Dr. Pride. Excuse me. I was on my way to get these sterilized.”
“Stop and talk to me for a minute,” Michael said. “What’s the situation? Has anybody got any news from out there?”
“News?” Sister Margarita Rose said.
“I’ve got news,” Sister Augustine said. Unlike Sister Margarita Rose, Sister Augustine was neither young nor delicate, and she didn’t wear a habit. Sister Augustine was somewhere in her fifties, five feet tall, a hundred and forty plus pounds, and fond of velour sweatsuits. She was wearing one now in bright purple, with a little black veil on the back of her head.
Michael let Sister Margarita Rose go. “Hello, Augie. I haven’t seen you all day.”
“I had four deliveries today,” Augie said. “Never mind about that. The Blood Brothers have the block between One Forty-fifth and One Forty-sixth streets on Lenox blocked off. The Cyclones staged a raid over there about five thirty. The casualties are just starting to come in. The Cyclones have assault rifles.”
“Bad?”
“Two police officers dead over at Lenox Hill Hospital not more than five minutes ago. A two-year-old boy dead on arrival here about quarter to six. What do you mean, bad?”
“Right,” Michael said. He looked around the emergency room. People were tense and bustling, but they weren’t really busy, not yet. That would come when the sirens he could hear in the distance were no longer so distant.
“Okay,” Michael said. “We better assume a full disaster and set up to process to Triage. Can you get me six nurses down to OR in five minutes?”
“Sure.”
“I’m going to need both Jenny Kaplan and Ben DeVere. Jenny’s supposed to be having the day off. You’ll have to find her.”
“I already have.”
“Find Ed Marchiano, too. I know he’s only a medical student, but we’ll just have to fudge a little. It’s that or watch people die on the floor. He’s supposed to be teaching a health class to the mother’s group at six thirty. You can find
him there.”
“I’ll send Sister Margarita Rose.”
“Right,” Michael said. Then he looked around and shook his head. “Are we ready for this? Didn’t we promise ourselves the last time that we’d be more ready for this? What’s happened to New York?”
“Oh, New York.” Sister Augustine was dismissive. “This hasn’t been New York for years. This is Beirut. Are you all right, Michael?”
“I’m fine.”
“Newspapers haven’t been bothering you?”
“I’m fine, Augie. I really am.”
“I don’t care if you get arrested, Michael, but if you keep this up, you could get AIDS. Or just plain killed.”
Michael was about to tell her that it didn’t make any sense to practice safe sex through a glory hole, just to see if she knew what that was, just to see if he could shock her—but he knew he couldn’t. He didn’t because the bell started to go off and the staff started to run in from everywhere at once, pulling back the double doors to let the stretchers in, standing back while one white-sheeted casualty followed the other in a confusion of sterilized cotton and stainless steel. Michael grabbed a box of disposable surgical gloves from the nearest shelf and started heading for the OR.
“Demerol,” he shouted back at Augie over the crowd. “I need Demerol for post-op.”
“Coming,” Augie shouted back.
Michael saw Sister Margarita Rose and thought it might be a lot less than three full months. The little nun looked paralyzed. She looked as if she wanted to be dead.
Michael himself felt fully alive for the first time all day—for the first time in weeks, really, in spite of that ill-fated excursion down to Times Square. He felt alive and clear and healthy and energetic and smart and beautiful and perfect. It was as if he had been taken completely out of the world and transformed and returned to it. It was as if he had reached that state desired above all others by every graduate of the Harvard Medical School: the state of being able to do no wrong.
