Murder Superior (14 page)

“Of course I know my way to the kitchen,” Mary Bellarmine said. “Sister Agnes Bernadette has had every Sister in the Order running back and forth like laboratory rats helping with the food.”

“Gracious as always,” Reverend Mother General said. She turned to Nancy and Henry Hare. “What about the two of you? Do you know your way to your parking lot?”

“There’s no reason why both of us should miss this reception,” Henry Hare said stiffly. “I’m going to call my driver to pick Nancy up.”

“I don’t think so,” Reverend Mother General said.

“But—” Henry Hare said.

Reverend Mother General gave him a look that would have turned stone to dust, and he retreated.

The novices had disappeared with their mops and rags. Mother Mary Bellarmine was headed for a door at the back of the foyer that Gregor hadn’t noticed before. Sister Mary Alice had returned to the amorphous crowd and stopped looking as if she were chewing antibiotics undiluted with sugar. Even Nancy Hare seemed to have calmed down—although Gregor had to concede that she’d been calmer all along than almost anybody but Reverend Mother General. No, lack of calmness was not Nancy Hare’s problem.

Gregor had turned toward Sister Scholastica, meaning to ask her impressions of the way it had all worked out, when he became aware of the fact that the crowd was parting in front of him, and even Scholastica was stepping aside. He looked in the direction everyone else was looking in and found Reverend Mother General, bearing down on him as if he were a rabbit in the path of a train.

“Mr. Demarkian,” she said, in her deep emphatic voice that would have played well as the voice of God speaking from the burning bush, “I have to talk to you for a moment.”

From the other side of the doorway, Bennis Hannaford caught his eye and winked.

E
ARLY IN HIS ASSOCIATION
with things Catholic, Gregor Demarkian had learned that there were times it was the better part of valor just to shut up. Following Reverend Mother General through a door and down a corridor off the left side of the foyer was one of those times. The door had been decorated with baby blue bunting and a picture of Mary holding out the rosary to the children of Fatima. The corridor was decorated with baby blue bunting and brightly painted posters that looked out of place, as if they had originally been intended for somewhere else. Several of them displayed the message Gregor had first seen in Philadelphia and had been seeing everywhere since, including on the habits of some of the nuns, who wore little plastic pins with the legend,

ON MOTHER’S DAY REMEMBER THE MOTHER OF GOD.

Reverend Mother General was not wearing such a pin. She wasn’t paying any attention to the posters, either. She was marching them both to the corridor’s end, God only knew what for.

What was at the corridor’s end were two small studies, each supplied with an overstuffed couch, an overstuffed chair, and a small coffee table. All the furniture had seen better days in the administration of Woodrow Wilson. Reverend Mother General picked the one on the right—she was right-handed; there was nothing to choose between them—and motioned Gregor inside.

“Please excuse us for all that fuss in the foyer,” she said. “We really hadn’t planned on anything of that sort. Maybe that sounds obvious. But maybe we should have anticipated it. It’s so very hard to know. Nancy Hare—that’s who that was, Nancy Hare, in case nobody upstairs told you—anyway, we’ve all known Nancy for a long time. She has a penchant for theatrics.”

“Is she someone important?” Gregor asked.

“Important?” Reverend Mother General looked stumped. “She was a student here in a parish school we run—not right here but in Radnor. And then she went to Sacred Heart. And then she came to this college. She’s married to Henry Hare. Does the name mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“He’d be disappointed. He’s the founder and CEO of VTZ. It’s a communications conglomerate, I think.”

“It’s a communications corporation,” Gregor said. “I think that in order to be a true conglomerate you have to be at least a national operation, and VTZ as far as I know is still local. Newspapers. Radio stations. A cable channel.”

“Also construction,” Reverend Mother General said. “I think it may all have started with construction, but don’t quote me, because it’s not the sort of thing I have an easy time keeping straight. At any rate, VTZ owns a number of companies that supply construction material and do construction work. Mr. Hare has donated a great many materials and services to the building of a new field house for St. Elizabeth’s College.”

“Ah,” Gregor said.

Reverend Mother General gave him a sharp look. “What’s that supposed to mean, Mr. Demarkian? Ah?”

“It’s supposed to mean that I was wondering why you put up with him. Or with her, either, alumna or no alumna. You don’t put up with much, Reverend Mother.”

“I wouldn’t put up with anything for an ordinary field house,” Reverend Mother General said. “No, it isn’t that I’m just finding it more and more difficult in my old age to be as categorically judgmental as I used to be. That is probably God’s grace.”

“If you say so.”

“There is also the problem of Mother Mary Bellarmine,” Reverend Mother General said. Then she seemed to think better of it. She sat down on the overstuffed chair and folded her hands in her lap.
Notice all the things the older nuns do
, Scholastica had told Gregor once,
that don’t seem to make any sense
,
but would if they were wearing long old-fashioned habits instead of these new ones
.

“Believe it or not,” Reverend Mother General said, “I called you out here to ask you a favor, in spite of the fact that you did us an enormous favor a little more than a year ago, and now you’re doing another one by giving this speech. It’s a very big favor, Mr. Demarkian. It’s going to take a lot of work. And of course we can’t pay you any money.”

“Of course you can’t,” Gregor said. Gregor didn’t take money for involving himself in extracurricular murders. It was too likely to land him in trouble with the Pennsylvania licensing agencies. Gregor didn’t have a private detective’s license and didn’t want to get one.

“Ever since the—problems—we had in Maryville last year,” Reverend Mother General went on, “those of us in positions of responsibility in this Order have been discussing—oh, what am I doing?” Reverend Mother shook her head. “Sister Scholastica has been badgering us, that’s what’s been happening, and I have to admit I think she’s right. I think we could have prevented that murder last year, Mr. Demarkian, if we had known what we were doing.”

Gregor shook his head. “You had two very determined people to deal with. Unless you’re asking for clairvoyance, I don’t think you would have been able to deter either one of them.”

“Maybe,” Reverend Mother said, looking stubborn, “but there was that hate mail. You knew the difference between that and the ordinary kind. We didn’t.”

“I’d spent twenty years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“Then there were the simple procedural matters,” Reverend Mother General went on. “Who to call. Who to contact. What to report and how. It isn’t 1950 anymore, you know.”

“Yes,” Gregor said, beginning to get lost. “I know.”

Reverend Mother General wasn’t Bennis Hannaford, or Sister Mary Scholastica either. She clarified the point immediately. “What we’ve got to accept,” she said, “is that with the world the way it is and the way it’s going, we’re going to find ourselves dealing with the sorts of people who make dealing with the police more and more necessary. There are a lot of lunatics out there these days, Mr. Demarkian, and a lot of bigots. Just two months ago one of our Sisters was mugged in Boston—in habit, yet. Just three weeks ago, two of our Sisters in Detroit were hospitalized from wounds received from sniper fire. We staff parochial schools in every ghetto in the country and we’re proud to do it. Most of the people we deal with would be fine, upstanding citizens of any community they happened to live in, they just don’t have much money. Unfortunately—”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

“Cocaine,” Reverend Mother General said.

“Mmm,” Gregor said again.

“It’s not the people who use it you have to worry about,” Reverend Mother continued. “It’s the people who sell it. So you must see what I mean. You must see what our problem is.”

“Actually,” Gregor said, “I don’t exactly understand how I could be helpful in this sort of…”

“But of course you do,” Reverend Mother General said.

“But of course I don’t,” Gregor insisted. The only advice I could give would be to pull your Sisters out of the inner cities because they aren’t safe, and I couldn’t give you any advice at all about how to guard against the kind of thing that happened in Maryville last year because there isn’t any way to guard against it, so just what—”

“What we want you to do,” Reverend Mother General said, “is to write a handbook and give a little course. In procedures.”

“Procedures,” Gregor repeated.

“Procedures,” Reverend Mother General repeated. “When to call the police. When to call the FBI. How to preserve evidence. What constitutes evidence. How to handle the press—”

“Oh, no, now, if I knew how to handle the press I wouldn’t be the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.”

“Of course you would be. It was brilliant marketing strategy. And, of course, in most places we have the Chancery to help with the press, and sometimes that’s very good. Sometimes it’s not so good, however. You must know all these things, Mr. Demarkian. This is what you do.”

“But a project of the sort you’re talking about would really take a very long time—”

Reverend Mother General stood up, beaming. “That’s all settled then,” she said. “You’ll come in and speak to the Mothers Provincial a week from Tuesday. That’s aside from the general address you’ll be giving this week, of course, we wouldn’t deprive you of that.”

“But,” Gregor said.

“And don’t worry about the handbook,” Reverend Mother General told him. “We won’t need a draft of that for at least fourteen days.”

I
T HAD BEEN A
very long Sunday morning, complete with breezes that blew unconsecrated Hosts out of baskets and bees onto the lip of the Communion chalice, and by the time Father Stephen Monaghan was done, he was tired. He was especially tired because today had been one of what he thought of as his “death days.” By “death days” he did not mean days on which people had died. Father Stephen Monaghan was used to death in the way priests get used to death. He’d buried a couple of hundred people in his time. He had said Masses without number for the relief of souls from the sufferings of Purgatory. He could even contemplate his own death without too much difficulty. The span of a man’s life is three score and ten, the Bible said. Father Stephen Monaghan found this eminently sensible.

What Father Stephen Monaghan did not find eminently sensible were parishioners, particularly young and newly middle-aged parishioners, who seemed to have a highly peculiar idea of what life was about “Americans,” a titled British lady once said, “have somehow got the idea that death is optional.” The first time Father Stephen Monaghan had heard that quote, he’d thought it was ludicrous. That was twenty years ago. Now he said Mass on a college campus and in the churches of the surrounding towns when the college was not in session and the churches were short of priests. The people he preached to were either young or nuns. The people he preached to believed they were immortal. It was like talking to children. “Someday you’ll die,” he’d say, and they’d look at him with contempt so deep it might have bored a hole to the center of the earth. Death was a boogeyman fairy tale, as far as they were concerned.

Today, Father Stephen Monaghan had taken the noon Mass at St. Bridget’s in Eddingsberg. Eddingsberg was farther than he usually traveled to say Mass and out of his particular orbit. He’d gone there because the Bishop had asked him to and he always did what the Bishop wanted. He’d had high hopes for the afternoon. After all, Eddingsberg was rust-belt territory. He wouldn’t be caught in a clutch of yuppies up there. But he’d underestimated the reach of what he was beginning to think of as the “pernicious doctrine.” It must be something they were advocating on television. All he had said—in memory of the fact that his own mother had died on Mother’s Day—was that remembering the finitude of life was a good way to keep perspective on the things of this world. That was it. You want a pair of sixty-dollar Reeboks. You have forty-nine, ninety-five. You can walk around convinced your life is terrible, or remember that your life is finite and realize that Reeboks aren’t that important after all. That was a little muddled, but not so muddled it was difficult to understand. A four-year-old could have understood it. He’d looked out over the densely packed pews, at the blue ribbons tied into bows on each of the pews’ ends, over the heads of the women in their best. Sunday hats and the children wiggling and straining against the starch in their clothes. He’d delivered a sermon that was in no way substantially different from the second one he’d ever preached. He’d caused what amounted to a brush fire of indignation. Maybe he’d been a little off in his timing. Maybe this wasn’t the kind of sermon good hardworking people wanted to hear on Mother’s Day. Maybe he should have said some warm fuzzy things about the Motherhood of Mary and let it go at that. He didn’t know. What he did know was that when he was done and standing on the church steps, shaking hands with the people on their way out, a ferociously well-maintained woman in her early thirties had marched up to him, put her hands on her hips and announced: “If you learned to take better care of yourself, you wouldn’t have to think about death all the time. You could save your own life!”

Father Stephen Monaghan was himself waiting for the Rapture. He wanted to see the Heavens open up and Christ descending on a cloud. Or however it was done. The Rapture was mostly an evangelical Protestant concept, now seeping into North American Catholicism through various forms of folk religion. He wasn’t sure he had it straight.