Murder Superior (33 page)

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.”

G
REGOR 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 finished 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?”

“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?”