Murder Superior (28 page)

Gregor turned to Sister Scholastica—for some reason, she seemed a more likely candidate for this demonstration than Mother Mary Bellarmine or Reverend Mother General, and Gregor was terrified that Sister Agnes Bernadette would blush—and lifted up the long capelike collar until it exposed the top of the scapular. The scapular fit closely around the front of the neck and was fastened at the back with a small button. Gregor let Scholastica’s collar fall again.

“Your collar wasn’t torn,” he pointed out “Only your scapular was.”

“Yes,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “But what I really remember is being so wet.”

“So once you were wet what did you do?”

“I went downstairs and changed. We store habits in a room in this basement, I don’t remember why, it goes back to the days when St. Elizabeth’s was still building buildings or something of the sort. At any rate, there are supplies down here and I came to get them.”

“Did you go into the kitchen?” Gregor asked.

“I had no need to go into the kitchen.”

“Did you see Sister Joan Esther? Or Sister Agnes Bernadette?”

“No.”

“Did you see anybody else?”

Mother Mary Bellarmine considered this. “Sister Catherine Grace and that foul woman from the Registrar’s Office were in the plant room. The woman whose name I can never remember who’s still some kind of hippie—”

“Sarabess Coltrane,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “She’s really very nice, even if she is something of an anachronism.”

“She’s
totally
ridiculous,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “They were doing something with flowers, Ms. Coltrane and Sister Catherine Grace. That was on my way down. On my way up I saw that man. The one who makes all the racial jokes on the radio.”

“Norman Kevic?” Gregor was surprised.

“That’s it.” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “I remember wondering what he thought he was doing, wandering around like that. Of course, he’s got a tremendous financial interest in the field house—”

“I wouldn’t call it a financial
interest
,” Reverend Mother General said.

“Then let’s just say he’s got a lot of money invested,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said, “and he’s got stock in Henry Hare’s companies and I’ve been looking over those books and I don’t like them. You know I don’t like them, Reverend Mother. I’ve been saying so for a week.”

“Yes,” Reverend Mother General said. “You have been saying so for a week.”

“He was skulking around down there, looking into cupboards, doing I don’t know what. If I hadn’t been in a hurry, I would have demanded an explanation. As it is, you’re going to have to get an explanation directly from him.”

“I’ll go tell His Eminence,” Sister Scholastica said.

Gregor beat his finger against the scarred surface of one of the wooden tables. “Go get His Eminence,” he agreed, “but while we’re waiting for the delivery of Nancy Hare and Norman Kevic, I’d like to talk to—what are their names again? Sarah Elizabeth—”

“Sarabess Coltrane,” Reverend Mother General corrected. “And Sister Catherine Grace.”

“I’m on my way,” Sister Scholastica said.

“I don’t see that he’s doing anything we couldn’t have done ourselves,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said.

Gregor was glad to see that even Reverend Mother General herself ignored that.

W
HEN NORMAN KEVIC GOT
off the phone with Sarabess Coltrane, he spent a minute listening to Roger Miller singing “My Uncle Used to Love Me But She Died,” another minute contemplating the buying of a pack of Benson & Hedges Menthols, and a third minute deciding there was nothing for it but to go out to St. Elizabeth’s College. By then, Roger Miller had stopped singing and Steve was pacing back and forth outside the booth, absolutely furious, which was what Steve always was when Norm did the least little thing out of the ordinary. In this case, “out of the ordinary” meant playing music instead of talking for the last two and a half minutes of his show. Norm had done that because he’d wanted to talk to Sarabess and because, for God’s sake, he’d been talking on the air now for over a decade and you’d think the great American public would be sick of it by now. Steve was not sick of it, but Steve was not one of his most faithful listeners, either. Steve only turned on the radio when somebody warned him that the worst was about to happen. In Steve’s mind, “the worst” was anything that caused an advertiser to pick up the phone and call the station. In Norm’s mind, “the worst” was anything that might cause the
Philadelphia Inquirer
to say he was losing his edge.

But he was losing his edge. That was why the night with Sarabess had worked out the way it had, instead of ending up in bed, which was where Norman thought nights with women should always end up. He hadn’t stayed up talking until six o’clock in the morning since he was in college. He had never stayed up talking until six o’clock in the morning with a girl. He still wasn’t sure what it meant. He was just glad that Sarabess had felt perfectly comfortable calling him up in the middle of the morning. He wasn’t entirely sure why.

“Listen,” she had said, when he’d put Roger Miller on and signed himself off and guaranteed Steve’s bad mood for the rest of the day. Or maybe the rest of the week. “He’s here, that Demarkian man, and he’s asking the oddest questions. It’s like he’s psychic.”

“Psychic how?” Norm had asked her. “Did you tell him anything?”

“I didn’t tell him anything,” Sarabess said, “but Catherine Grace did. I’d forgotten all about Catherine Grace. She’s such an innocent.”

“She’s a child.”

“Well, maybe. But here he is, and he’s odd. Do you know what he did just a minute ago?”

“No.”

“He went down to the potting room and asked me to show him how we put the flowers in the vases before we put the vases on the table—isn’t that odd? I mean, how many ways can you put flowers on the table?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then he put a little bunch of daisies in a vase just the way you’re supposed to, with a little water at the bottom and then he held the vase in the air, and then do you know what he did?”

“No.”

“He turned the vase over on the one tablecloth we have down there. I mean, it’s an awful tablecloth and really old and stained and everything, but of course now it’s completely ruined.”

“Why?”

“Because of the plant food they put in the water for it, or whatever it is. Don’t you know about that? At St. Elizabeth’s you never fill vases just with water. The flowers die too soon. You mix in a little plant food and put that in, and the only problem with that is that the plant food turns everything it touches green—”

“What?”

“Green,” Sarabess said impatiently. “Norm, are you all right? I heard Mr. Demarkian talking to the Archbishop—the Archbishop is here, as if things weren’t bad enough—and they were saying they were going to call you up and ask you to come here. To talk, you know. For questioning.”

“I was questioned by the police,” Norm said quickly.

“Well, now you’re going to be questioned by the Catholic Church. Norm, I’m beginning to get very, very—I don’t know. But I am. Are you going to go into hiding?”

“Of course I’m not going to go into hiding,” Norm said. “I’ll be there in less than half an hour.”

“You will?”

“Of course I will. I just have a couple of things I have to do first.”

“I’m glad you’re coming,” Sarabess said. “I want you to come. When he was asking questions like that, I didn’t know what to do.”

“Mmm,” Norm said.

“He’s a very strange man,” Sarabess said. “He keeps walking around muttering to himself that he needs a knife. Sometimes I wonder if he isn’t a little cracked. Crazy, I mean. Dangerous.”

“Gregor Demarkian is always dangerous,” Norm said.

“I’m glad you’re coming,” Sarabess said.

Norm was glad he was coming, too. He was also glad he had an automatic lock button on his console that worked the door, because without it he would never have made it out of his chair in time to make sure Steve couldn’t get into the booth. His phone had three separate lines, too, which meant that he didn’t have to answer the one Steve was going to call him on any minute now just to get a line free to call out. He picked up his phone and called his car, from which his driver answered in a sleepy voice that indicated he’d been camped out in the driver’s seat waiting to go home. Norm considered the fact that staying up all night on no cocaine at all was practically as tiring as staying up with all you could snort, and what that fact meant for his future. It might mean nothing. Sarabess was organic, but Norm thought he could talk her out of that. He thought he could talk her into a haircut, too.

He told his driver to be at the south elevator door to the garage in fifteen minutes. Then he hung up, waited for a dial tone, and punched in the number for the local police. He had that number—along with the fire department, the FBI, the state capitol, the Roman Catholic Chancery, and the offices of the Philadelphia branch of White People’s liberation—on an automatic dial pad. He kept them on an automatic dial pad because he sometimes used them on his show. He could still remember the day he had called the Chancery pretending to be the Pope and caused a scandal so bad, the Papal Legate had come to visit him at the studio.

The phone was picked up on the police end by a young woman with a voice like strawberry syrup. Norman Kevic contemplated the ceiling of his booth and thought of green stains on white tablecloths and flowers wrapped in tissue paper and tied up with bright blue bows. The young woman went through her patented spiel about which branch of which government service he might actually be looking for, and then Norm told her.

“I’m looking for Jack Androcetti? I have some information for him about a homicide he’s working on?”

That, of course, was not entirely accurate, but it would get him put through to Androcetti, and that was really all Norm cared about.

After he’d had his little talk, he could go out to the car and get driven over to St. Elizabeth’s, where he would do his best to protect Sarabess and be on hand for any breaking developments at the same time.

Jack Androcetti, he thought, and made a face.

At least Jack Androcetti was better than Gregor Demarkian.

F
ATHER STEPHEN MONAGHAN HAD
seen many odd things in his day, but he thought the oddest was certainly this gathering of the tribes that had begun taking place on the sidewalk outside of St. Teresa’s House and was now spilling into the foyer and out the back of the reception room door. It wasn’t a gathering of the Order. The Order was still as large as it had ever been, and still as ubiquitous on this campus. Coming over to St. Teresa’s House from the little landscaping shed where he had finally found Frank Moretti, Father Stephen had seen dozens of them, in pairs and triples, walking on every available walkable surface. Their black veils flapped in the wind and their rosaries made an odd clacking noise whenever they were brushed by the wind. Father Stephen was reminded of the days before Vatican II, when he had said Mass every other Sunday at the chapel of the Motherhouse of a large Order of religious women based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The Sisters had come to and from chapel, to and from meals, to and from sleep, in perfect ordered rows, clacking all the way.

Frank Moretti didn’t remember the Church before Vatican II. Frank was only twenty-three, and he thought of all nuns as sort of odd. There was no religious awe in all of this. The young gardener thought of all virgins as odd as a matter of course.

They found Gregor Demarkian in the foyer, lying flat on the floor with his ear to the tiles, squinting into the dust in that place where the wall and floor joined. Since Reverend Mother General was also squinting into that same joint—although she was still standing; Father Stephen didn’t think Reverend Mother would ever go crawling around on the floor—Father Stephen didn’t think the dust would be there very long. Father Stephen waited while Demarkian sighed, stood up, and brushed off his suit. Father Stephen got the distinct impression that Gregor Demarkian was the kind of man who put on a suit as soon as he got up in the morning, no matter what he expected to do with his day. Demarkian looked around, looked at Father Stephen and Frank, and sighed.

“I don’t suppose you two have come to tell me about how you lost a knife,” he said.

“A knife?” Father Stephen said.

“I don’t deal in knives,” Frank Moretti said. “I don’t deal in guns, either, and I’m not exactly fond of blunt instruments. People can get hurt.”

“I suppose they can,” Father Stephen said. Then he did his best to put this conversation back on track. “We heard you were here,” he said, “and you were asking about anything that might have gone on that day—it was yesterday, I can’t believe it was only yesterday—that was odd. And there was something odd. Frank can tell you.”

“It was odd but it wasn’t important,” Frank said.

“What was it?” Gregor Demarkian looked interested.

Father Stephen nudged Frank in the elbow. Somehow, this wasn’t working out the way he’d expected it to. He’d been all excited when he’d heard Demarkian was here, and the Archbishop, too. It had felt as if they were all finally beginning to get their own back, after the way that dreadful young man had behaved to everyone and then gone off and told the newspapers about it. Now they were standing in the middle of the foyer with nuns all around them and other people, too, and it was—well, disorganized.

Gregor Demarkian had gone to the doors that separated the foyer from the reception room and was muttering under his breath. Father Stephen marched up to him and touched him on the shoulder.

“It was only the theft of some plant food,” he said bravely, “but that’s very strange, isn’t it? Who would want to steal plant food?”

“Plant food,” Gregor Demarkian said. He looked straight at Frank Moretti. “Where was this plant food stolen from?”

“Right across the way there,” Frank said. “There’s a shed, a landscaping shed, out behind St. Patrick’s Hall. It’s not far.”

“What goes on in St. Patrick’s Hall?” Demarkian asked.

“Classes, mostly,” Father Stephen said. “But this was Sunday, Mr. Demarkian. No one was there.”