Murder Superior (5 page)

“Oh, I don’t really have to work with her. She’ll just be around on and off, if you know what I mean. And she’s supposed to sit in on meetings.”

“On many meetings?”

Domenica Anne considered this. “There’s VTZ next week—”

“VTZ?”

“VTZ Corporation gave us most of the money to build the field house, Father. The wife of the founder is one of our alumnae. Actually, I shouldn’t say they gave us the money, exactly. They gave us their services. They run a construction company, among other things.”

“Among other things?”

“It’s a kind of local conglomerate, if you see what I mean. They own a whole lot of different businesses. They’ll build a lot of the field house for us and then write it off their income taxes.”

“Ah, I see. So no VTZ, no field house.”

“Exactly.”

“So it would be a good thing for you to keep your temper in any meeting with VTZ executives in attendance.”

“Exactly,” Domenica Anne said again.

“Then let’s work on that.”

Domenica Anne blinked. It was so obviously not what she’d expected to hear. Father Stephen understood how she felt. In the old days, he’d never have said anything of the sort. He’d simply have told her to try to keep her temper and then given her an Our Father and five Hail Marys to say as penance. He would have done it in spite of the fact that she hadn’t committed any sin that needed to be forgiven. Now he was supposed to provide some real help with her problem, and he was trying.

Actually, the person he’d really like to provide help for was Mother Mary Bellarmine herself, but she hadn’t come to see him, and he didn’t think she would. It was one of the sad truths of religion that the people who needed it most never came looking for it. It was one of the hallmarks of sin that the world’s greatest sinners often thought of themselves as the world’s greatest saints.

Saints or sinners, all these confessions about Mother Mary Bellarmine were beginning to make him nervous, and Father Stephen Monaghan didn’t like to be nervous.

They’re all closed up in here, he thought, looking around the rose garden as Sister Domenica Anne went on pacing. They’re all shut up in here together. It can’t be a good way to live.

“I keep trying to think of some way to ship her out of here and back to California,” Sister Domenica Anne said, stopping at the side of an overgrown bush that seemed to be growing thorns for Sleeping Beauty’s castle. “If I could just find some way to get rid of her, I could finally relax.”

And that, Father Stephen Monaghan thought was precisely the sort of thing that made him jumpy.

N
ANCY CALLAHAN HARE LIKED
to tell people that all the girls she’d ever known who’d gone to convent schools had turned out wild, and although that wasn’t true—most of the girls Nancy had been with at Sacred Heart and St. Elizabeth’s had degenerated into bright-eyed country club wives with three children each in private schools and a seat on the parish advisory board—most of the people she knew weren’t Catholic, and it worked out anyway. It at least made a stab at explaining Nancy herself, who was thoroughly inexplicable otherwise in the circles in which she moved. The circles in which Nancy Hare moved had a lot of money, a lot of cosmetic surgery and a fair number of lifetime subscriptions to Paris
Vogue
. They did not have much of anything else, which made their situation a little ambiguous in Philadelphia, which was a city that believed in
old
money. The age of money was not something Nancy worried about herself. She’d always been an outsider in Philadelphia. When she was growing up, it was enough to be Catholic and Irish to be beyond the pale. She was perfectly happy to have no social cachet at all, as long as she had money to spend and younger men to go to bed with.

The young man Nancy had gone to bed with the night before—that would have been May 4—was a tennis pro at the club her husband had founded with four other men, when all five of them had been turned down at every established club on the Main line. The new club was shinier and larger and better equipped than the old ones could ever hope to be, and in no time at all it had become almost as difficult to get into. The tennis pro was named Barry Something and on “sabbatical” from Yale, from which Nancy inferred that he’d been asked to take a year off and get his act together. Whether this had been caused by too many drugs or too little studying she neither knew nor cared. The young man she was going to go to bed with right this minute—at quarter to ten on the morning of May 5—was of much more interest to her at the moment. His name was Mark Something and he worked in a bookstore in downtown Philadelphia. He was supposed to be a novelist, but Nancy had met twenty-two-year-old novelists before. She had met painters and poets and composers and musicians before, too. If they were serious they took off for New York or California. If they stayed in Philadelphia they were going nowhere fast. Nancy preferred the ones who were going nowhere. Her husband was going somewhere, and what that meant was perpetual impotence and a head full of calculations and the instructions for hiring a taxi in Riyadh.

Mark had a one-room apartment in a tall grey building within walking distance of Society Hill, with a couch that folded out and a narrow sink full of dirty dishes. He had a boom box the size of Dallas propped up against a found-art coffee table that was pulsing out the last few minutes of Good Old Cultural Norm. Nancy knew Good Old Cultural Norm very well, although not as well as Good Old Cultural Norm had wanted to know her, and the sound of that oily voice bashing the Japanese made her head ache. Nancy was very careful not to allow herself to get headaches, just as she was very careful not to allow herself to smile too much or frown too much or move around too vigorously when she wasn’t exercising. She’d had very bad luck with her genetic inheritance. She was only forty-five years old and she’d already had three facelifts. She’d had breast implants, too, and liposuction. She’d had a nose job when she was fifteen and her teeth capped when she was twenty. She was a very expensive work of art from one end to the other, and she didn’t like wrecking herself on the adolescent inanities of Norman Kevic.

What she did like was Mark, and this thing she had thought up with whipped cream. It had taken her a long time to think up this thing with whipped cream, and she was a little proud of herself. Nobody she hadn’t told would ever guess that she’d spent so many years at school with the nuns, or that she was even now heavily involved with the alumnae association of her old college, which was forever sponsoring seminars on things like “The Virtuous Woman: Who She Is and How to Become Her.” When people asked, Nancy always said her husband insisted. She was supposed to be involved with something that would get her name in the papers and look good in the company prospectus they sent out every year to stockholders and members of the board.

The thing with whipped cream required fourteen pressurized cans of Reddi Wip and six jars of cherries. Mark had bought them and spread them out on his kitchen table, which was a
kitchen
table only by virtue of being shoved off into the corner nearest the half-size stove. Mark was standing at attention next to the trove, looking very proud of himself. Mark was always proud of himself. That was part of what Nancy wanted him for.

What Nancy Hare did not want him for was sex. Nancy Hare did not like sex. She had never liked sex. She was never going to like sex. She engaged in a great deal of it, but that was only because everyone expected her to. If she could have gotten a reputation for being intensely desirable by standing on her head in front of the liberty Bell, she would have done that

She took off her sunglasses—she always wore sunglasses, even in winter—and cast a jaundiced eye at the boom box. Cultural Norm was just gearing up for a new assault on all things Japanese. What he had against the Japanese was beyond Nancy’s comprehension. Mark saw where she was looking and didn’t even have the grace to blush.

“I’ve been listening to him all morning,” he said. “He’s been talking about that thing you’re involved with. The nun’s convention.”

“I’m not involved with any nun’s convention,” Nancy said.

“The thing at the college,” Mark told her, speaking very slowly, as if he were talking to an idiot. It was one of his least endearing traits, this fantasy of his that he was brighter than she was.

She picked up one of the cans of Reddi Wip and shook it. “I’m not involved with it,” she said. “It’s VTZ that’s involved in it. I have a place on this committee I never go to except to get photographed for the papers and then I have to show up for a party next week and smile a lot for the Sisters. It’s all got something to do with business.”

“How could a convention in a convent have something to do with business?”

Nancy shrugged. “Come to the bathroom with me. Were you good? Did you clean out the tub?”

“I got this woman I know to clean it out for me. I’m no good at cleaning things out.”

Nancy thought he’d get good at cleaning things out if he had to live for a while with the results of not being good at it, and then she thought this woman must have a very interesting place in Mark’s life. She pushed open the door of the bathroom and decided she didn’t care, because the bathtub really was cleaned out and it probably wouldn’t have been if Mark had stuck to doing it himself. If this worked out she thought she would take him with her to Le Bourget, which was the restaurant all her friends were taking their lovers to lately, and where she had made it a point never to appear twice with the same man. Mark would look good in a suit and a tie and when he talked he would be almost presentable.

“The thing is,” she said, “you’ve got to get into the tub first with your clothes off, and then you’ve got to wait.”

“Are you going to take pictures?”

“Of course I’m not going to take pictures.”

“I think it’s too bad you’re not involved in this nun thing,” he said. “It sounds interesting. Hundreds of nuns in one place. Maybe thousands. How are regular people ever going to tell them all apart?”

“Take your clothes off.”

“I’m taking my clothes off, for God’s sake. I’m just making conversation. What’s the matter, dealing with a bunch of nuns gets you spooked?”

“Of course nuns don’t get me spooked. I just don’t want to talk about them. Why should I? A bunch of homely women who work off their frustrations telling themselves that they’re in love with God. I don’t believe in God.”

“Do you believe in Hell?”

“I believe Hell would be having to spend the rest of my life with those women in that convent,” Nancy said. “Now take your clothes off. Norm’s just doing his usual bit for employee relations. The boss is supporting the Sisters of Divine Grace, so Norm is making fun of them.”

Mark looked startled. “VTZ owns that station? I didn’t know that.”

“I don’t know why you didn’t. It’s announced practically every half-hour along with the call signal. It isn’t a secret.”

“I’m not saying it was a secret. I’m saying I didn’t know.”

“Lie out flat on your back,” Nancy said, “and stick your legs up over the rim on this end. Don’t fold them. Right. You look very cute.”

Mark snorted, but he did what she’d told him to do. He unfolded his legs and lay as straight out as he could in the shortish tub. It was the old claw-footed kind and built for someone much smaller. Mark was six feet two and broad. Nancy waited until he had adjusted himself to her satisfaction, then shook the can of Reddi Wip hard. When she set it off against his belly button, it made a sound like a rocket going off.

“Jesus Christ,” Mark said. That’s cold as Hell.”

“I’ll bring a bunch of cans in this time,” Nancy said, walking out on him.

He called after her, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Nancy went back to the kitchen table and began to tuck cans into her arms against her chest. On the other side of the room, the boom box was pounding out Norm’s closing theme and being overridden every fifteen seconds by Norm’s voice telling another juvenile joke. “What did the Japanese trade minister do when he got to Heaven? Looked out over the angels at work and said, ‘The Japanese are more industrious than you.’ ” “What’s the difference between a Japanese teenager and an American teenager? The American teenager doesn’t need someone to wind him up in the morning.” Nancy made a face at the boom box and headed back to the bathroom.

“Here I come,” she called out as she came in, to find the whipped cream beginning to melt against the heat of Mark’s skin. “Norm is just going off the air. How can you listen to that idiot is beyond me.”

“How you can be married to the idiot you’re married to is beyond me. You want to explain that one to me again?”

“It wouldn’t matter how many times I explained it. You’d still be too young for me no matter what I did about it. Stop eating the whipped cream.”

“I’d rather eat you.”

“Well get around to that later.”

“Is your husband going to be back in time to take you to this party you say you’ve got to go to at the convent?”

“Of course he is. If he wasn’t, I wouldn’t bother to go.”

“If he wasn’t, maybe you could take me. I’d love to go.”

Nancy waved this away, and started on another can of whipped cream. Nuns. Husbands. Whipped cream. Mark. Under her picture in the high-school yearbook were the words “Nancy’s Greatest Ambition: Never To Be A Housewife.” She didn’t know if she’d made it or not.

She did know that she was sick and tired of hearing about those damned nuns. She’d been sick and tired of hearing about nuns all her life. Ever since her much-older half-sister Megan departed for the Mesdames of the Sacred Heart, Nancy had been getting chapter and verse on how wonderful it was to be a perpetual virgin.

In spite of the fact that sex hadn’t turned out to be anything like what she’d expected, Nancy Hare still thought nuns were nothing but trouble.

T
HERE WAS A STATUE
of St. Catherine of Siena at the bottom of the rose marble steps leading to the Sisters’ Chapel. St. Catherine had a book in her hand and the cap of a Doctor of the Church on her head, perched above the veil of her habit. Mother Mary Bellarmine didn’t remember which Order St. Catherine had belonged to—she kept thinking it was the Carmelites and then changing her mind, because Teresa of Avila had been a Carmelite—but she did know that this Catherine was not her kind of saint, and never would be. Mother Mary Bellarmine didn’t like intellectual women, or hysterical ones either, and Catherine had been both. Mother Mary Bellarmine also didn’t like the Spanish. Sometimes she wondered if there was something in the air over there that made women join orders to have visions and live on nothing but the Eucharist. Sometimes she wondered if there was something in the air over there that made people stupid in a more general way. The Good Lord only knew, she had never met a Spaniard with an ounce of sense.