Murder Superior (27 page)

“No,” Gregor said. “I don’t think that. Let me ask you something. If I was to—consult, as you put it—do you think you could get some people to talk to me? Some very specific people?”

“I could probably deliver any practicing Catholic in this Archdiocese,” David Kenneally said, “appealing to courtesy if nothing else.”

“
I
could deliver the Pope,” Reverend Mother General said.

The Pope won’t be necessary,” Gregor said faintly. “What I’d like to do first is to talk to Sister Agnes Bernadette, not here but over at St. Teresa’s House. I want to go down to the kitchen where the food was prepared—I did understand that rightly, the food was prepared at St. Teresa’s House?”

“That’s right,” Sister Scholastica said. “The cold food, anyway. There were some hot dishes that were made other places and then brought over to be microwaved up.”

“But the chicken liver pâté was made there,” Gregor insisted, “and the fugu fish was stored there—”

“That is quite correct, Mr. Demarkian,” Reverend Mother General said. “And as for the fugu fish, possibly you should talk to the chef—”

“He only speaks Japanese,” Scholastica reminded her.

“Perhaps you should speak to Mother Andrew Loretta,” Reverend Mother General corrected. “That’s what I’ll do. I’ll get Sister Agnes Bernadette, Mother Andrew Loretta, and that chef over there at the same time. That way, you can question them all. Is there going to be anybody else you’re going to want?”

“I’m going to want quite a lot of people,” Gregor said, “but the only one you might have difficulty getting hold of is Nancy Hare.”

“Nancy Hare?” Scholastica looked shocked.

“I’ll get on the phone to Henry,” David Kenneally said with a sigh. “Oh you don’t know how I don’t like to get on the phone with Henry. I’ll try to have Mrs. Hare here in an hour.”

“Tell her she’s been granted an ecclesiastical annulment,” Scholastica said acidly. “She’ll be here in twenty seconds flat.”

Reverend Mother General ignored her. “Come,” she said to Gregor Demarkian. “Help me over to St. Teresa’s House. I like to watch you operate.”

The last time, Reverend Mother General had several times threatened to make sure he couldn’t operate at all, but Gregor didn’t think this was the time to mention it. With nuns, there were a lot of things there would never be time to mention at all.

L
IKE CAVANAUGH STREET
, St. Teresa’s House seemed to have decided not to let go of Mother’s Day. Gregor didn’t know if he was noticing more of the decorations today because the place was relatively deserted, or if little elves had come in the night and tied baby blue ribbons to every available surface, but the general effect was one of almost maniacal mother worship. Of course, Catholics didn’t “worship” Mary any more than Armenians did, but Gregor would have been hard put to make that point to anyone whose first experience of Catholicism was the long hall leading to the basement kitchen of this particular place.

MAY IS MARY’S MONTH,

one poster after another proclaimed. The relentless message was relieved only by variations, like the blue-and-white concoction that declared

THE MOTHER OF GOD IS THE MOTHER OF US ALL,

Sister Scholastics saw Gregor staring at the posters and whispered in his ear, “They were made by the elementary-school children in all the parish schools run by this Order in Philadelphia and on the Main line. The deal was there was going to be a contest, and the winners were going to get their posters put up here during the convention, except nobody wanted to disappoint any of the children and besides the teaching Sisters were all worried about self-esteem—”

“In my day we didn’t have self-esteem,” Reverend Mother General said from Gregory other side. “We had self-respect. And no more of it than what we had earned.”

Sister Scholastica went on ahead, opened a door covered with a picture of Mary holding a child wearing a gold crown, and said, “Oh, Aggie, there you are. And Mother Andrew Loretta. Do you know—”

“Mr. Yakimoto will be here in just a minute,” Mother Andrew Loretta sang out

Gregor got a little ahead of Reverend Mother General and went into the kitchen. It was much as he had expected, the picture of church basement kitchens everywhere, in spite of the fact that this was not the basement of a church. It was a little more elaborate than it might have been, but just as spare, with long plastic-topped counters and laminated shelves, mismatched as to color and material, as if whoever had put them in had consciously decided not to take trouble with what nobody in the public was ever supposed to see. Gregor noticed a tall door at the back with a heavy metal handle and asked the nun whose face was familiar from last night’s news broadcasts, “Is that the freezer?”

Sister Agnes Bernadette nodded.

Gregor went over to the freezer and peered inside. It was a standard commercial walk-in freezer, the kind of thing small-town hamburger joints put in as a matter of routine. The air inside was frigid. There were a pile of large boxes on the floor in one corner with Japanese characters written across them in red and black. Gregor nodded perfunctorily in their direction and then stepped back out of the cold. He closed the freezer door and turned to look at the people who were waiting for him.

“Well,” he said. “Let’s start from the beginning, shall we? I take it you’re Sister Agnes Bernadette.”

Sister Agnes Bernadette was near tears. Gregor had the feeling that Sister Agnes Bernadette had been near tears since she’d been arrested, and maybe before. Sister Agnes Bernadette was the kind of woman who was often near tears. “Oh, Mr. Demarkian,” she sniffled. “I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so glad you changed your mind—”

“Don’t be glad yet,” Gregor told her. “I haven’t done anything. I just want to get a few things straight. Is that all right?”

“Of course it’s all right,” Reverend Mother General said.

“Let’s start with how you and Sister Joan Esther ended up here putting chicken liver pâté into ice sculptures. Was Sister Joan Esther assigned to help you? Was it known in advance that she’d been doing this job? Was this an organized thing?”

“Oh, no.” Sister Agnes Bernadette shook her head. “I was supposed to do it all on my own—the pâté, that is, and the ice sculptures. I mean, the ice sculptures were already done. I did those last week when I had a spare minute from the other cooking, which wasn’t easy to find, you know. And then yesterday morning I was supposed to come down here and make chicken liver pâté in the food processor and use the ice cream scoop to fill the heads, but when I did one of my statues was broken—”

“Broken?” Gregor asked.

“With the head and the feet knocked off,” Mother Andrew Loretta said. “Mr. Yakimoto—oh, good, here comes Mr. Yakimoto now.”

Mr. Yakimoto was a small Oriental man with wild eyes. He had been angry on Sunday and he seemed to be angry still. He took up a position near Mother Andrew Loretta that suggested that he’d just as soon take off for Borneo, or go into a fit that would leave more than a statue in pieces on the ground. The door to the corridor opened behind him. Gregor and Reverend Mother General looked up at the same time, just catching Mother Mary Bellarmine as she slipped in behind Mr. Yakimoto. Reverend Mother General started to say something sharp, but Gregor stopped her.

“It’s just as well Mother Mary Bellarmine is here,” he said. “We can get to phase two without having to wait for her to come. Now. For phase one. Let me go over this carefully. Sister Agnes Bernadette, you came down here to work on the chicken liver pâté when?”

“About an hour before the reception,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I went to a late Mass, you see, and then I had other things to do, and really, this thing with the chicken liver pâté isn’t supposed to be very complicated. And then I came down here and opened the freezer and there it was. There they were. Mr. Yakimoto and the statue. Broken.”

“Mr. Yakimoto didn’t mean to break the statue,” Mother Andrew Loretta said. “It was an accident.”

Mr. Yakimoto began to speak very rapidly in Japanese. Mother Andrew Loretta nodded at him vexedly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian, I know we talked about this yesterday and I didn’t know anything, but we have all been asking around. We really are trying. According to Mr. Yakimoto, what happened was that he came downstairs yesterday afternoon to get the fugu out to prepare it for serving. It had to be defrosted. The first thing he noticed was that the top box in the stack had been cut into—slit open is the way he’s been putting it—”

Mr. Yakimoto jumped in with another cascade of Japanese.

“Yes,” Mother Andrew Loretta said. “One of the fish was gone, missing, and Mr. Yakimoto was rightly very concerned about it. He hoped that it might be still stored somewhere in the freezer, and so he began to look through everything there, and after a while he began to get a little excited—”

“I know exactly what happened,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I get that way all the time myself. You try to fix things and you try to fix things and after a while you just get crazy.”

“One of the statues dropped when he was looking behind it,” Mother Andrew Loretta said, “and at just that point Sister Agnes Bernadette came in, and he tried to get across to her how serious a thing had happened, but of course she doesn’t speak Japanese, so he decided to go out and try to find one of the Sisters here from Japan, but they were all in chapel—”

“And in the meantime, I was getting frantic,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said, “because it was getting late. So I went rushing out into the corridor and there was Joan Esther—”

“Did that make sense?” Gregor asked. “Was that someplace Sister Joan Esther should have been?”

“It made sense for anybody to be anyplace yesterday,” Sister Scholastica put in. “There was so much going on.”

“I think Joanie was doing a little hiding out,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I think it had all begun to get to her, and I couldn’t blame her for that because it had all begun to get to me, too. Nuns, nuns, nuns. It’s all very strange.”

“It used to be normal,” Reverend Mother General said.

Agnes Bernadette ignored her. “Joanie was there so I got hold of her and dragged her in, and she was one of those take-charge people so it was all right. She saw what the problem was right away and started to help me—to put the statue back together, I mean. And she did, too. The statue did get put back together.”

“What about after that?” Gregor asked. “What about putting the balls of chicken liver pâté in the statues’ heads?”

“Joanie didn’t do that,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I did that myself. Joanie got the trays set up for me instead.”

“All right,” Gregor said, “what about those trays? Who decided who was going to carry which one where?”

Sister Agnes Bernadette looked confused. “Nobody decided anything. We got the trays all set up, but there weren’t any differences in the sculptures. Then we needed people to carry them, so Joanie went up to the stairs and opened the door and called up, and eventually somebody answered and she got some Sisters to come down and help. Then we each of us took a tray and went trooping upstairs.”

“In no particular order,” Gregor said.

That’s right,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said.

“So it was just coincidence that Sister Joan Esther ended up carrying the ice sculpture that was destined to be placed on the table assigned to the one woman she disliked most in this Order.”

Sister Agnes Bernadette looked confused. “Mother Mary Deborah? Joanie didn’t dislike Mother Mary Deborah. Nobody dislikes Mother Mary Deborah.”

“It was Sister Mary Sebastian who brought the ice sculpture to Mother Mary Deborah,” Reverend Mother General said.

“But that can’t be right,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I know I’m not a very organized person, Reverend Mother, but I can count.”

“She got called out of the line,” Sister Scholastica said suddenly. “I’d forgotten all about it. It was only for a second—”

“
I
called her out of the line,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “Her veil was unfastened. It looked like a handkerchief stuck to her head.”

“What was she supposed to do about it with a tray in her hands?” Scholastica demanded.

“Oh, dear,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I see what happened. I see where Joanie ended up.”

“Where Sister Joan Esther ended up was the grave,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said crisply. “She ended up there early and badly, as might have been expected. I came down to watch you, Mr. Demarkian. I came down to see how a great detective works.”

At the moment, Gregor didn’t feel much like a great detective. He felt like a small boy being scolded by an adult he has no respect for. He looked Mother Mary Bellarmine up and down and considered his possible moves.

“It occurs to me,” he said, “that you might have been in a position to see something nobody else did. You did come down here in the middle of the reception, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “I did. How did you know that?”

Gregor hadn’t known it. He’d known Mother Mary Bellarmine had had to go somewhere to change after her run-in with Nancy Hare, and he’d hoped it was down here, and God had smiled.

He said only, “I saw what happened, in the reception line, with Mrs. Hare. Do you know
why
she threw, a vase of roses on you?”

“I haven’t the least idea,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said.

“Neither does anybody else,” Gregor told her. “Well, we’ve got Mrs. Hare coming in to talk, maybe she’ll tell us. Let’s get back to you. It was a pretty violent attack.”

“Was it? I’ve known Nancy Hare for years. Since the days when she was Nancy Callahan and I was teaching at this college. She’s always been violent—
emotionally
.”

“She was being more than emotionally violent, yesterday.”

“I noticed.”

“She tore your habit.”

Mother Mary Bellarmine shrugged. “My habit got torn, yes. I don’t remember Nancy tearing it deliberately. I suppose she must have.”

“She had to have,” Gregor said. “It couldn’t have simply snagged on a stray nail. It was protected by your collar. Look.”