Murder Superior (24 page)

“You must really have made an impression,” the young woman repeated. “I’ve never heard Norm talk like that about a woman. You don’t look like I expected you to.”

“Oh,” Sarabess said.

“Usually Norm is such a smarm,” the young woman said. “I take it you haven’t been to bed with him.”

“What?” Sarabess said.

“Never mind,” the young woman said. “Of course you haven’t been to bed with him. If you had, he’d have made you sound like a taxi dancer. Never mind. Let’s go.”

The young woman started down the corridor away from the intersection and Sarabess followed, feeling more confused than ever and wondering what she was supposed to make of it all. Apparently, Norman Kevic had rather liked her, or something. What was that supposed to mean?

At the moment, it was supposed to mean that he would let her in to talk to him, which was vitally important. Sarabess had to do something about that conversation she’d had with Sister Catherine Grace.

For the moment, she thought it would be just as well to get that done and see what came next.

If anything did.

I
T WAS QUARTER TO
twelve, and at St. Elizabeth’s Convent, almost everything was quiet. Compline had been sung. Final prayers had been said. A rosary had been started for the succor of Sister Joan Esther’s soul. If the habits had been longer and the Office sung in Latin, Sister Scholastica might have thought she had been transported to 1953—or 1553. That was part of what she loved best about being a Catholic and being a nun. She liked to think of all the women before her who would find her life utterly familiar and be able to live it themselves without hardly any adjustment at all. Even having a murder in the house might not have been too much of an adjustment Religious life in the Middle Ages and the High Renaissance was not the placid and well-regulated thing it became later. Sister Scholastica sometimes wondered if she would have found it more interesting than what she had now.

She went down the back hall of the visitors’ wing—visiting Sisters only, here; secular visitors got rooms in St. Francis of Assisi Hall—and let herself down through the door at the back there and then through the back door of the chapel. The light inside was very dim, but she could see Sister Agnes Bernadette nonetheless, kneeling close to the front with her back hunched over as if she’d acquired a bad case of osteoporosis in a matter of hours. Scholastica dipped her fingers in holy water, made the sign of the cross and went inside. When she reached the center aisle she genuflected in the general direction of the tabernacle and then hurried up to the front. If Sister Agnes Bernadette had been praying, Scholastica wouldn’t have interrupted her. Sister Agnes Bernadette wasn’t praying. Sister Agnes Bernadette was in tears.

Scholastica sat down on the pew and put an arm around Sister Agnes Bernadette’s broad shoulders.

“I thought this is where you’d be. I checked your cell to see that you were in bed, and you weren’t.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Whatever you’re going to do, you can do it a lot better if you’ve had some rest.”

“But it’s all so impossible.” Sister Agnes Bernadette raised her teary face to Scholastica. “I didn’t kill Joan Esther. I didn’t kill anyone. I don’t even think I killed them by accident, Sister, because then a lot of people would have died, wouldn’t they? Mother Mary Deborah ate almost all her chicken liver pâté by herself and there was nothing wrong with
that
.”

“I know,” Scholastica said.

Sister Agnes Bernadette sat up a little straighter. “I don’t think that poisonous man cares what’s true or not,” she said. “That Lieutenant Androcetti. I think all he cares about is getting on the television news.”

“Well, I’ll agree to that.”

“I don’t think he thinks I killed her either. I heard that man, that Gregor Demarkian, say that they weren’t absolutely a hundred percent sure there had been a murder. There had to be lab tests and an autopsy—oh, dear—an autopsy on Sister Joan Esther—”

“Now, Sister—”

“But you must understand what I’m saying,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “Nothing matters to that man except making an arrest and making news because as long as there’s a trial he’ll look good. I was thinking all this out while I was sitting in jail. As long as there’s a trial he’ll be fine, because when the trial comes out not guilty it’s just the prosecutor who will look bad. Not him. Sister, I—”

“It’s all right.”

“I keep trying to offer it up,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I keep telling myself there’s no help for it, I’ve been arrested and things will go along from here and there will be a trial, and because I’m not guilty of course I won’t be convicted, but in the meantime it will all be so awful, so awful, and so I keep trying to offer it up—”

Offer it up, Sister Scholastica thought. This was terrible. She hadn’t heard of anyone “offering it up” for years. Schoolchildren “offered up” the pains of scraped knees or the humiliation of not being chosen for the baseball team in a childish attempt to identify with the sufferings of Christ. Grown women were not supposed to “offer up” totally unfounded murder accusations and full-blown media-hype trials. At least, Scholastica didn’t think they were. Scholastica’s God was a good deal more sensible than the One worshiped by so many other people.

“Don’t you worry,” she told Sister Agnes Bernadette. “We’ll take care of it. We’ll get Gregor Demarkian to take care of it.”

“But Gregor Demarkian said he wouldn’t take care of it,” Sister Agnes Bernadette pointed out. “He said that because the police didn’t want him there as part of the investigation—”

“I know what he said.”

“But how are you going to make him change his mind?”

“I’m not going to make him change his mind.”

“But—”

Sister Scholastica stood up. “Come on,” she said. “Get some sleep. We’ll have Mr. Gregor Demarkian on our side in the morning. I promise.”

“Sister—”

Scholastica held up a finger. “
First
I’m going to wake up Reverend Mother General.” She held up another finger. “
Then
Reverend Mother General is going to wake up John Cardinal O’Bannion.”

“John
O’Bannion
?”

“Then,” Scholastica held up her third and last finger, “Cardinal O’Bannion is going to wake up Gregor Demarkian. Trust me. It will work.”

“But what about
our
Cardinal?” Sister Agnes Bernadette asked wildly. “What about the Archbishop of Philadelphia?”

Sister Scholastica shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry about him. I think Reverend Mother General can take care of him.”

And since that was true, Sister Agnes Bernadette meekly agreed to be escorted to bed.

I
T WAS DONNA MORADANYAN’S
idea to build a maypole in the middle of Cavanaugh Street, but there were objections—the two young men who occupied the local cop car, for instance, felt it would have a deleterious effect on the logical nature of traffic—so in the end she put it up in the window of the Ararat restaurant. Gregor Demarkian saw it for the first time on the morning of Monday, May 12, when he went to meet Father Tibor Kasparian for breakfast. He saw a few other things, too, but he was in so foul a mood they almost didn’t matter. The maypole was a good six feet tall and wrapped around with ribbons of every possible color. May might be Mary’s month and blue might be Mary’s color, but if the symbolism held, Mary was only one of a number of aspects of spring being celebrated here. Gregor tried to remember what a maypole was for and couldn’t. He had vague memories of Elizabethan England and royal picnics and customs stretching back to a pagan mist, but that might have been some movie he saw with Glenda Jackson in it. He stopped on the street and looked the maypole up and down anyway. Then he said the Armenian-American equivalent of “bah, humbug” and bought a copy of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
from the metal pull dispenser at the curb. The front page of the
Inquirer
was full of the murder of Sister Joan Esther but not, Gregor was happy to see, full of him. There was a picture of the front of St. Teresa’s House with the hundreds of nuns milling around it and another of a tensely smiling Jack Androcetti. Gregor looked long and hard at Androcetti’s picture and just restrained himself from sticking his tongue out at it. The ribbons of the maypole rippled and winked, blown about by a breeze inside the restaurant. Gregor folded his paper under his arm and went to look for Father Tibor.

Tibor was inside, sitting in a wide booth in the back, with the remains of five or six strong Armenian coffees spread out across the table and an ashtray full of the butts of the dark brown Egyptian cigarettes he smoked. He was looking at the paper, too, but opened to an inside page, and as Gregor slid into the other side of the booth he looked up and shook his head. Gregor was in the kind of mood when he gave lectures about how calling Turkish coffee Armenian coffee because you couldn’t say the word
Turkish
in an Armenian neighborhood for any reason except to start a riot was taking it all too far, but just as he was about to get started Linda Melajian came up with coffee and a bowl of fried dough. Gregor was embarrassed that he couldn’t remember the Armenian name for the kind of fried dough this was. Linda Melajian was very young and very polite to older people, the way the very young are very polite to creatures they consider only recently landed here from Mars.

“Good morning, Mr. Demarkian,” she said. “I read all about you in the paper this morning. You want your usual scrambled eggs?”

“I want my usual scrambled eggs,” Gregor said, “thank you, Linda. Tibor? What was there to read about me in the paper this morning?”

Tibor looked up, shrugged, and turned the paper around so that it was right side up for Gregor and Gregor could read it. His little bald head gleamed in the light, and his shoulder seemed less hunched than usual. Tibor was younger than Gregor by almost ten years, but he looked older. A couple of years in Siberia and a half dozen more in one Soviet prison or another could do that to you. Tibor was a cheerful man, but he often looked physically tired. This morning, he looked less so.

Gregor looked down at the two-page spread of paper Tibor had turned for his inspection, caught his own picture—standing next to Bennis, looking hot and disheveled while Bennis looked as close to perfect as Bennis usually did—let his eye travel up to the headline and winced. The
Inquirer
had done it to him again. It never failed. It was a kind of vendetta. The main headline read:
DEMARKIAN OUT.
The subhead sounded less like baseball news:
NO ROOM FOR PHILADELPHIA’S OWN ARMENIAN-AMERICAN HERCULE POIROT, ACCORDING TO POLICE LIEUTENANT.
Gregor turned the paper around so it was right side up for Tibor and sighed.

“Has Bennis seen that yet?” he asked.

Tibor shook his head. “Bennis is not awake, Krekor, you should know that. She is never awake until very nearly noon. Are you very upset about this police lieutenant?”

“I’m getting very interested in just how bad a reputation he’s got. Look at that subhead. ‘According to Police Lieutenant’ Newspapers never say it like that. They say ‘According to Police.’ ”

“It is Donna Moradanyan you have to watch out for,” Tibor said. “She is very worked up this morning. She has decided we have to hold Mother’s Day again.”

“What do you mean, hold it again?”

“Hannah Krekorian’s children and grandchildren could not come, Krekor, and Hannah was disconsolate, and there was no one to cheer her up because everyone was having Mother’s Day but Hannah was not, so now Donna Moradanyan thinks we should hold it again. Mother’s Day. For Hannah. To make her feel as if she’s had one.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

“We will do this next Sunday, Krekor, and it will require a party where people play games. Donna and Lida Arkmanian were planning it this morning. During a party where people play games, I would like to be in Florida on vacation.”

“I don’t blame you. What about the refugees? Don’t they need anything from you that could keep you away?”

“The refugees will all be invited, Krekor. You know what these women are like. There are no refugees, just people who are probably fifth cousins twice removed if you look back far enough but nobody wants to bother so you let them stay on the living room couch just in case. I wish I had come to Cavanaugh Street when I was first a refugee. It would have saved me a bout of dysentery in Jerusalem.”

“Considering what else could have happened to you in Jerusalem, I think you got off easy with the dysentery.”

“I do not think it is natural for someone as young as Donna to be so close to someone as old as Lida. Not like this. Lida is old enough to be the mother. Donna is old enough to be the daughter. They should fight.”

Linda Melajian had come back with Gregor’s scrambled eggs—three of them, on a big plate that also contained four Jimmy Dean spicy breakfast sausage patties and a pile of hash browns the size of a small dog. None of this was Armenian food, but the Ararat served it anyway because the Melajian women were convinced that if they didn’t, people like Gregor and Father Tibor would never get any breakfast at all. It was Cavanaugh Street’s one complaint about Bennis Hannaford that she seemed never to have cooked breakfast for anybody, even for herself. That was tempered by reports from Lida Arkmanian and Sheila Kashinian about what happened when Bennis
did
cook.

Gregor thanked Linda for the plate, grabbed the salt and began to pile it on. He ignored Tibor’s fretted
tsking
—Tibor ate pastry for breakfast, pastry so sweet it could make Gregor’s teeth curl—and picked up a triangle of toast to add more butter to it. It already had enough butter on it to qualify it as a bona fide outpost of a dairy state.

“If you keep that up, you will give yourself an illness,” Tibor said.

Gregor looked up to tell him what a crock that was—this
was
the man who fried his own chicken in bacon fat—but as he did he caught sight of Ararat’s front door out of the corner of his eye, and turned to see who it was opening to let in. The door had opened and shut again and the young man had been standing near the table nearest the cash register for half a minute before Gregor’s mind was able to put it all in place. It wasn’t the sight of a black man on Cavanaugh Street that was the surprise, or even a black man in the Ararat for breakfast. There was a time when that would have been a shock, but not anymore. Gregor knew every detective in the Philadelphia police force’s homicide division, and a number of them had been to Ararat to eat breakfast with Gregor Demarkian. (The tourists, white or black, weren’t supposed to know about breakfast.) It wasn’t the color of this man’s skin but the arrangement of his features that gave Gregor Demarkian pause. The man looked so damn familiar but Gregor just couldn’t place him.