Murder Superior (23 page)

“I’m surprised they haven’t come here asking to talk to you,” Henry said, “with that stunt you pulled and then disappearing on me so I couldn’t find you for better than half an hour—”

“I didn’t disappear on you. I just went to talk to someone.”

“Well, you were missing and you were still at St. Teresa’s House, and we were supposed to be gone. You don’t
know
how that burns me. She shouldn’t have asked me to go. She should have gotten rid of you and left it at that.”

“Why? Because you’re giving them umpteen jillion dollars?”

“Yes.”

“Some people don’t operate on a totally cash basis, Henry. Some people have other considerations.”

“I don’t give a damn what she considers for herself,” Henry said, “I only care what she considers for me, and I shouldn’t have been tossed out of that reception like a gate-crasher. I’m not a gate-crasher. I’m the man who made it all possible.”

“You didn’t have anything to do with the nuns’ convention.”

“That’s not what I meant. I’ve donated six million dollars in goods and services to this project of theirs. That college wouldn’t survive without me.”

“The college wouldn’t survive unless you built them a field house?”

“You really shouldn’t talk about money, Nancy. You don’t understand the first thing about it. You’re not competent.”

“I don’t see why anybody from the police should have wanted to talk to me,” Nancy said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever met this Sister Joan Esther. And nothing happened at all to the nun I threw the vase on.”

“Except that she got wet. And green. And ripped.”

“I know she got ripped, but I didn’t rip her.”

“You must have ripped her,” Henry said. “You were the only one there. You were probably so far out of control, you didn’t know what you were doing.”

“I am never that far out of control.”

“You’re that far out of control all the time. It’s your life. It’s what you do instead of working for a living.”

I couldn’t have ripped the scapular because I couldn’t have got to the scapular to rip it, Nancy thought, and it was true. The top of the scapular was concealed under the sweep of the long collar that covered the shoulder and part of the arms and all of the chest until the breast line. She couldn’t have gotten to the top of the scapular without ripping the collar off first—it ought really to be called a cape—or doing something so outrageous everybody would have remarked on it, like grabbing at Mother Mary Bellarmine in such a way that it would have looked like she was about to commit rape.

Her cigarette was burned halfway down. That was enough. Nancy put it out and went to get another one. Across the room, Henry was standing in nothing but a pair of Christian Dior underwear, looking more like the tall, handsome boy she had married than he had in years.

I used to be happy in this place, she thought. Then she lit the cigarette she was holding in her hand and turned away.

It was all indicative, really it was.

He had asked her for an explanation of what she had done to Mother Mary Bellarmine and she had given him an answer calculated to make no sense and he had not pursued it.

He considered her such a flake that it wasn’t worth his time to unravel why she did what she did, when or to whom.

He was so wrapped up in himself, he didn’t have time to puzzle out anyone else’s behavior or to consider it even for a moment in any light but the one that reflected on himself. To Henry, what Nancy had done to Mother Mary Bellarmine was to commit an act that got Henry Hare thrown out of a reception given by the Sisters of Divine Grace.

It all went around and around and it never got any better, and Nancy was sure it wouldn’t get better if she told him she hadn’t had a reason at all for throwing those flowers on Mother Mary Bellarmine.

“What are you
staring
at?” Henry demanded now.

Nancy decided to let that one ride, too.

If she started getting the hots for Henry Hare again, she was only going to come to grief.

I
T WAS ELEVEN FIFTEEN
on Mother’s Day night, and Sarabess Coltrane was worried. She was worried about where she was—which was on a dark street in downtown Philadelphia, alone, standing under a street lamp that seemed to have been dimmed down in front of a door that seemed to be lit by a spotlight—and about what she was about to do. She was afraid that when she went upstairs in this building somebody—a security guard or a secretary or somebody—would make her go away again. She was worried that when she saw Norman Kevic, he wouldn’t remember who she was. Most of all, however, she was worried about the conversation she had had with Sister Catherine Grace that afternoon, and with Norman Kevic too, when they were all working on the roses.

Sister Joan Esther was lying dead, and it had all happened exactly the way Sarabess and Catherine Grace had imagined it would. Norman Kevic had to remember that. They had gone into it all in detail. So far he hadn’t told the police, but Sarabess was sure he was going to. He would have to. He was famous and he probably had a stake in being a good citizen. Once he told, Sarabess was sure she’d be in all sorts of trouble, and Catherine Grace, too, because that police lieutenant was a real loose cannon, as Sister Scholastica had been saying all afternoon. Actually, Sister Scholastica had been saying a few other—and stronger—things, but it embarrassed Sarabess to remember them. Nuns weren’t supposed to talk like that.

If I don’t go in now, I’ll never go in at all, she thought.

She forced herself away from the lamppost and into the puddle of shadow just beyond it—surely it was much too small a puddle to contain a murderer or a rapist or a mugger or anything else human—and went to the door. The door was made of glass and framed in brass with the WXVE lightning logo etched into the glass just above the brass handlebar. Sarabess pushed against the handlebar, holding her breath. The door could have been locked. She had been listening to Norman Kevic live all the way into the city from St. Elizabeth’s. She had been listening to him while she parked her car and while she walked down the street to this door. She had been listening to him through the earphone of her little Japanese radio right. Up until about ten minutes ago, when she had started to work up her courage to go inside. Norman Kevic had to be in this building, but that didn’t mean the building wasn’t locked.

It wasn’t locked. Sarabess pushed her way into the foyer. She stopped at the little desk that blocked the way to the elevator and looked around. There was supposed to be a security guard or somebody. There was a clipboard on the desk with a signup sheet on it and people’s names and floors written in little squares in pencil. Sarabess looked around and saw no sign of a uniformed man or a gun-toting woman or anyone else. Whoever it is has probably gone to the bathroom, she thought. It wouldn’t be fair to just go on up. She went on up anyway. She went around the desk and to the elevators and jabbed at the buttons. The elevator doors opened immediately and she stepped inside.

This was the point at which things might have gotten sticky. Sarabess had never been in the WXVE building before, but since it was such a large building she was sure it wouldn’t be
just
for WXVE. There would be other businesses with offices on these floors, architecture firms and certified public accountants, and she had absolutely no idea who was where. If there was a directory in the lobby, she hadn’t seen it. Even if she had seen it, she wouldn’t have taken the time to read it. If she had, the security guard might have come back, and then God only knew what would have happened. Now she pushed a button at random—“fourteen” because it was really “thirteen” and Sarabess liked to be counterphobic—and prayed for rain. If it wasn’t the right floor, it could at least be a neutral one. It could be one where the security guard wasn’t roaming around looking for trouble.

The fourteenth was a floor belonging to Martin, Debraham, Carter, and Allenkoski, attorneys at law. The elevator opened onto a darkened foyer with a large oak desk in it. The desk had a rose pink felt blotter in the middle of it and a brass nameplate next to the phone that said, “Tiffany Moscowitz.” Sarabess pressed the button for twenty-two and held her breath.

On “twenty-two” she had a little luck. It didn’t belong to WXVE, but it wasn’t deserted, either. It belonged to a magazine called
Greek World
, and they must have been meeting a printer’s deadline for an issue. Sarabess knew all about printer’s deadlines. She had worked for an underground newspaper in college, and what she had come away from it with was the conviction that some members of the working class were worse than the capitalist class, and among those members were all printers. It was disgusting. If you went so much as a half hour over deadline they charged you all kinds of penalties, and then they made you pay time and a half on top of it. Sarabess was sure that every printer drove a Cadillac and smoked thick cigars, conspicuously consuming the environment.

Greek World
had a logo that looked like a whirling dervish dancing on the top of the Parthenon. It was tacked to the back wall of their foyer in the form of an enormous oakboard poster painted in acrylic primary-colored paints. When the elevator doors opened, a young man was running by with a huge stack of mechanicals badly balanced in his arms. Sarabess hated to stop him. She knew the look on his face. It said he’d lost any control he’d ever had over his panic hours ago.

She had to stop him. She had no choice. She stepped out of the elevator, grabbed at the sleeve of his shirt and said, “Excuse me?”

The man with the mechanicals stopped. He looked around the foyer as if he had never seen it before. He looked at Sarabess as if he had never seen her before. In the second instance, he was right.

“Excuse me,” Sarabess said again. “I seem to be lost. I’m supposed to be going to WXVE—”

“That’s downstairs,” the young man said promptly.

“Downstairs where?”

“Depends what part of them you want Reception’s downstairs on ‘twelve.’ ”

“Good. I’ll go to reception.”

“Except nobody’s there. Only nine to five. Broadcast is on ten.”

“Fine,” Sara said desperately, “I’ll go—”

“They’ll never let you in there,” the young man said. “You don’t have one of those passes on your shirt.”

“But—” Sarabess said.

“You’d better go to ‘nine,’ ” the young man said. “Nobody knows that’s part of WXVE at all. The elevator opens on a little dinky foyer and the foyer leads to all the office warrens and nobody ever wants to go there if they don’t have business. Try ‘nine.’ ”

“Yes.” Sarabess stepped back into the elevator.

“Greeks are crazy,” the young man told her. “I thought I knew that because my mother is Greek, but I never really knew that until I got here.”

“Yes,” Sarabess said again.

The doors to the elevator closed again. Sarabess checked to make sure she had pressed the button for ‘nine’—it was lit up, in all that crazy talk she couldn’t remember doing it—and sank back against the wall. Her stomach felt full of glass. Her heart felt hollow. Now she was supposed to wander around through a warren of private offices, looking as if she belonged somewhere in them, which she didn’t, and trying to get—where? Were there internal staircases? Was Norman Kevic wandering around himself? In all this time she had wasted, he might have finished up and gone home. They’d said on the radio it was a special appearance just to talk about the murder. Sarabess didn’t know if you called time on the radio an “appearance.”

The elevator doors opened on ‘nine.’ The foyer really was dinky. It was also unmarked. Sarabess stepped into it and looked around. Nobody seemed to be in the offices beyond the foyer, if what they were were indeed offices. Sarabess couldn’t hear the sound of a single conversation or a hollowly buzzing phone.

There were three openings off the foyer, not doors but archways of a sort, badly made, like the ones in cheap tract houses. Sarabess went through the middle one and looked around. She was on a long corridor lined with cubicles. It was the kind of place she had always been afraid she’d get stuck working. She went on through as quickly as she could without feeling as if she were running, which was not very quickly. When you’re frightened, you always feel as if you were moving faster than you are.

The corridor of cubicles came to an end at a kind of intersection, with new corridors going to the left and to the right. Sarabess peered in each direction and thought she saw a light to the left of her. It was all so dark and sterile here and so hollow. She was suddenly reminded of the story Norman Kevic had told that afternoon of his search for a men’s room. The parallels were unmistakable and she started to laugh.

There was somebody down there in a cubicle, light on and all. Whoever it was—female, Sarabess thought—called out “Who is it?” in a voice twice as scared as Sarabess thought she could manage on her own.

“I’m sorry,” Sarabess called back. “I’m lost I’m supposed to find a man named Norman Kevic.”

“Oh, Norman. Good old Cultural Norm. Norm isn’t here this time of night.”

“Yes he is. He was a witness to the murder—”

“What murder?”

“There was a murder at a reception at St. Elizabeth’s College this afternoon. Really. I’m not a nut. You can check it out.”

“Norm was a witness?”

“Well, he was there. You know. He’s doing some kind of special broadcast right now all about it.”

“Just a minute.”

Sarabess listened to a set of beeps and wonks that she supposed was a phone, then to a murmuring voice whose words were unintelligible but whose tone rose by the minute. Then there was a sharp click and the cubicle voice called out: “What’s your name?”

“Sarabess Coltrane.”

More murmuring. There was another sharp click.

“That was Norm,” the cubicle voice said. “He said I was supposed to take you right up. Just a minute and I’ll be ready to go. You must have really made an impression.”

“What do you mean?”

An actual person emerged from the single lighted cubicle, a woman so young Sarabess could barely believe she was out of high school, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and a pair of hot pink plastic flip-flops that slapped against the soles of her feet.