Murder Superior (12 page)

Finding a men’s John in a building on the campus of a women’s college run by nuns is not as easy as it might be elsewhere. Norman Kevic didn’t even know who he would properly ask for directions. Nuns had always made him nervous even when they were not paying attention to him. When they were paying attention to him, they shot his anxiety levels into the stratosphere. Then there were all these posters and signs and displays dedicated to Motherhood, virgin and otherwise. Norm wouldn’t have guessed nuns could be so hyped on mother love. Several of the nuns he’d bumped into had been wearing little pins that said “
On Mother’s Day
,
Remember the Mother of God
” just the way, at Christmas, they wore little pins that said “
Jesus is the Reason for the Season
.” The pins were very tiny and very discreet. In all likelihood, Norm was the only one who’d noticed them. The problem was, mothers made Norm even more nervous than nuns did. Norm’s own personal mother had been a harridan of the first water. If he’d had the sort of mind susceptible to the recovery movement, he could have made a career out of going to support groups and listing the ways in which his mother had alternately terrorized and suffocated him, never mind the times she’d simply taken off her belt and let him have it. The idea of calling a nun “mother,” the way he had been supposed to do in the receiving line, made him physically ill.

He passed into the reception room, looked around, and saw nothing in the way of doors except the set that let to the foyer. He approached these cautiously, in case Nancy’s bizarre action might be having a ripple effect He found he had nothing to fear. There was a fuss going on—being made more by the nuns than by anyone else, which figured—but it was self-contained at the tail end of the receiving line and not going anywhere soon. Norm peered into the crowd and decided that the nun Nancy had attacked had not been murdered. That would be Mother Mary Bellarmine, who was a consultant for the Order on the field house project and whom Norm had met a number of times over the past week, at publicity meetings or at discussions of the project, to which Norm had contributed one hundred thousand dollars. Norman Kevic was no fool. When he insulted an institution as large and as well positioned as the Roman Catholic Church, he made a point of buttering it up as soon as he had an excuse. He was glad Nancy had handed it to Mother Mary Bellarmine anyway. From what Norm had seen of Mother Mary Bellarmine, she made his mother look like an angel of light.

Once into the foyer, Norm looked left and right and found two doors, set discreetly into corners and camouflaged with baby blue bunting. The doors had no signs on them and no signs near them. Norm had no way of knowing if they were gateways to passages or simply closets. He could have asked someone, but he didn’t want to do it. Norman Kevic had never really been an extrovert. In fact, he’d never really liked people much. They scared him, and—as his mother had told him repeatedly; the very worst thing about Norman Kevic’s mother was how often she was right—they weren’t
interested
in knowing him. He could get very convivial when he’d had a few snorts. He hadn’t had a few snorts in hours. If he could find the bathroom maybe he could take care of that kind of business there as well. Whatever. It was easier to explore on his own. If he blundered into a closet, he could always claim he was looking for his coat. Although who would wear a coat in this weather, he didn’t know. He had to get a grip on himself.

The door to his right had on it not only baby blue bunting, but a large oval picture of the Virgin standing on a puffy cloud with her hands held out and a halo around her head. Norm decided to choose that one, because it was his favorite picture of the Virgin from parochial school. Norm hated on principle all pictures of the Madonna and Child, but he was fond of young Marys with dreamy blue eyes in flowing dresses that rippled in the wind. They reminded him of the kind of music video produced by earnest women singers who were serious about Art.

Norm opened the door and peered down into a corridor, which was thankfully not a closet, but wasn’t much better, either. It was narrow and dank. Its ceiling was lined with thick, badly painted pipes. Its walls were dark green from the floor halfway up the wall and pale green the rest of the way to the ceiling. Norm felt around on the wall beside the door for a switch. He turned on the light and looked inside some more. Surely, if the men’s room was down here, there would be directions? Surely, the men’s room
wasn’t
down here, because even for a feminist institution this sort of mistreatment would be too much?

Norm went into the corridor and closed the door behind him. He had no idea if St. Elizabeth’s was a feminist institution or not. He had no clear idea of what a feminist was. Hell, he had no clear idea who Norman Kevic was. He walked down the claustrophobic corridor until he came to a place he had to turn, and hesitated. To his left there was more corridor. To his right there was a heavy fire door. He went to the fire door and opened it up.

“There,” a woman’s voice said, not so much drifting up to him as flying up, like a rocket. “That ought to be just fine. Now all we have to do is fill the cones with flowers, tie the cones with ribbons, and bring them upstairs.”

“I don’t know,” another woman’s voice said, soft and tentative. “I have to tell you, Sarabess. I think we should have started with the flowers and wrapped the paper around them. I don’t think we should have made paper cones first.”

“Well, we did make paper cones first,” the woman Norm took to be Sarabess said. “We’re just going to have to live with them. Get me a big pile of roses, Sister, and then we can get started.”

There was a breeze coming up from something open down there. Norm went on through the fire door and found himself at the top of a short, shallow flight of stairs. The stairs reached a landing six steps down and then proceeded into the dark. Norm went down to the landing and stopped. Now he could see another door, partially propped open, with light spilling out into the dark under his feet. Every once in a while, the light was obstructed by shadows, which Norm took to be the bodies of women, going back and forth doing whatever they were doing in the room they were in. He advanced a few more steps down, hesitated, and advanced again. It occurred to him that it was a good thing that his quest for the John had been basically on philosophical grounds.

He got to the bottom of the steps and the half-opened door and looked in. He had expected to see a pair of nuns, but what he saw instead was a single young nun and a woman with greying hair who seemed to be some kind of superannuated hippie. They were both working diligently at a line of the kind of paper cones florists used to put bouquets in, except that instead of being green the paper was baby blue, like everything else in this place. Norm peered harder through the door and saw that although the room beyond was strictly functional, with paint that looked like it belonged in a furnace room and bare wooden tables whose surfaces were as splintered as the surface on a cellar door, a certain amount of effort had been put into decorating here, too. On the far wall right in his line of vision was another one of those posters.

Norm moved toward the door, raised his hand, and knocked. He would have walked right in, but he had been noticing lately that women no longer took well to that kind of surprise. He’d walked in unannounced on one of the women in the office once last month and she’d very nearly belted him. He didn’t know what had gotten into women these days.

Nobody inside seemed to have heard him. He raised his hands and knocked again. “Yoo hoo,” he called, and instantly felt ridiculous. “Can I come in?”

The hippie woman dropped what she was doing and marched over to the door. “Oh,” she said, flustered. “It’s Mr. Kevic. What are you doing here?”

Since Norm was sure that if he’d met this woman before, he would have remembered it—the grotesque are as memorable as the beautiful—he assumed she knew who he was from his publicity. “I was looking for the—ah—the—”

“The toilet,” the young nun in the background piped up.

“Right,” Norm said. “I was looking for that. I seem to have gotten lost.”

“You’re in the basement of St. Teresa’s House,” the hippie woman said.

“I’m Sister Catherine Grace,” the young nun told him.

“I’m Sarabess Coltrane.”

Norm gave a little thought to it and decided that no, he had never heard of Sarabess Coltrane and there was no reason why he should have. The high administrators of the college were all nuns and there was no way Sarabess Coltrane was one of those. Norm had only met Reverend Mother General once, and that just half an hour or so ago, but he could just imagine what she thought of Sarabess Coltrane’s outfit. Saggy cotton Indian print dress. Plastic barrettes holding back hair that could have used a cut, a conditioner, and a curl. Birkenstock sandals. It was embarrassing.

Norm edged into the room and looked around. There were a pair of industrial sinks along one wall that he hadn’t been able to see from outside, and drains here and there in the floor. There was also a freezer whose door had been propped open and that seemed to be filled with flowers. Sarabess Coltrane had even more flowers in her hands. The flowers she had had originally were lying on the long wooden table, badly wrapped in a blue paper cone.

“Here,” Norm said. “Let me help with that. I’ll probably be faster.”

“You?” Sarabess Coltrane sounded doubtful.

Norm took the roses out of her hands and walked over to the table to get a cone. The young nun had been right, of course. They should never have made the cones first. Oh, well. It wasn’t that hard to fix if you knew how to fix it.

“I used to work for a florist when I was going to college,” Norm said. “That’s how I made my spending money before I found a station that would take me on. I used to wrap flowers all the time. Can I have one of those ribbons?”

“Of course,” Sister Catherine Grace said.

“The flowers are for the Mothers Provincial,” Sarabess Coltrane said. “We’re supposed to present them right after lunch.”

“Right after lunch may be tomorrow,” Sister Catherine Grace said, “because the kitchen is right down the hall from here and we’ve been listening to poor Sister Agnes Bernadette, having one problem with the food after another.”

“If nobody ever presents a bouquet to Mother Mary Bellarmine, nobody will care,” Sarabess Coltrane said.

Sister Catherine Grace sighed. “Sarabess had a run-in with Mother Mary Bellarmine the day before yesterday. It was very sticky. We’ve been standing around down here all afternoon plotting—” Sister Catherine Grace flashed a look of agony at Sarabess Coltrane and blushed.

“Never mind,” Sarabess said. “We haven’t made any secret of it. Anybody who walked by outside could have heard us.” She leaned over Norm’s shoulders and hissed in his ear: “We’ve been plotting
murder
.”

Catherine Grace giggled.

Norm went over to the freezer and contemplated the roses. “How many in a bouquet?” he asked. “Twelve?”

“Of course twelve,” Sarabess said.

“Roses are Mary’s flower,” Catherine Grace said.

“You shouldn’t be plotting murder with Gregor Demarkian upstairs,” Norm told them. “Don’t you know who he is? The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.”

Sarabess drew a stool up to the table and sat down to watch Norm at work. “We know who Mr. Demarkian is,” she said, “but the point we’ve been harping on is that it would be perfect I mean, you could murder anybody you wanted to today—at least from down here—and you’d have to get away with it.”

“It’s because of the food,” Catherine Grace said.

“If you go through that door there,” Sarabess told Norm, “you get to the other part of the corridor. This room straddles it. Anyway, down there there’s the kitchen with all the food for the party just lying around, and in here there’s tons of poisonous stuff, lye, gasoline, cleaning fluids, all kinds of things.”

“And if you didn’t want to use something from this room,” Catherine Grace said, “you could use something from the boiler room, because it’s between here and the kitchen. There’s kerosene in there.”

“And it wouldn’t matter how bad the poison smelled, because there would always be some kind of food that smelled worse. Let me get you some more roses. You’re
very
good at that.”

“Thank you,” Norm said. He was very good at it. He was always very good at everything. Even when he hadn’t had much practice. Even—almost especially—when he was stewed to the gills. People did not get to where Norman Kevic had gotten to without being able to deliver at that level in that way. He considered the proposition the two women had put before him and found an objection.

“What about this room?” he asked them. “If anybody who wants to commit murder by putting poison in the food has to pass through this room to get to the food—”

“But they wouldn’t,” Catherine Grace said. “There’s two more sets of stairs on the other side. One from the first floor and one from the garden—you know, through an outside door.”

“Nobody ever comes the way you came,” Sarabess said, “except fire marshals when we have a fire drill. How did you ever get into that corridor?”

“I took a door in the foyer and kept on going,” Norm said. “But wait a minute. What about your victim? If you poison the food you can’t possibly know who’ll eat what you poison. Unless you take a very little of it and put it on a cracker and hand it right over, and then somebody might see you and there you’d be. Behind bars.”

“We could kill any of the Mothers Provincial,” Catherine Grace said.

“Like Mother Mary Bellarmine,” Sarabess elaborated. “Because of the ice sculptures.”

“What?”

“Sister Agnes Bernadette has ice sculptures made in the shape of nuns, one for each of the Mothers, and there’s going to be chicken liver pâté in each one and when they come out each of the Mothers Provincial and Reverend Mother General too, of course, are supposed to eat first from their particular sculpture. It’s going to be a big fuss. So you see, all you have to do is poison the right chicken liver pâté—”

“And the sculptures are all going to be marked,” Catherine Grace said.