Murder Superior (9 page)

Gregor Demarkian was a man of that generation that came of age just after World War II. He believed in reason and logic, not intuition and dreams. He felt nothing but exasperation for people who were forever exploring their subconscious. He didn’t actually think he had a subconscious.

To prove that he didn’t—and that the subconscious he didn’t have wasn’t fixated on Bennis Day Hannaford—he got up, topped up his already full enough cup of coffee, and trained all his attention on the plaster of paris topographical map of Armenia, that looked like a vision of Mars at the end of an intergalactic nuclear holocaust.

E
XACTLY FORTY-FOUR MINUTES
later, Bennis Hannaford emerged from her bedroom in a rustle of red silk and a tinkling of gold chains, looking like a short, black-haired Catherine Deneuve getting ready to do a perfume commercial. Her relationship to the Bennis Hannaford of the plaster-of-paris-filled kitchen was entirely speculative. Her relationship to half of the really old money on the Philadelphia Main line was evident When Bennis was dressed up like this, Gregor always thought of her background—complete with dancing classes, private schools, and a debut that had made the pages of
Town and Country
—as definitive. When she wasn’t dressed up like this, he didn’t think of her background at all.

She turned her back to him and pointed at the base of her neck. “There’s a little button there I can’t reach. I’ve never understood the designers of women’s clothes. I mean, do they think I’ve got a husband or a maid?”

“Both,” Gregor said.

“Is your friend the Cardinal going to be at this party? I mean, here we are, going off to visit the Catholics, and I haven’t heard a word about him.”

That’s how you think of this? ‘Going off to visit the Catholics’?”

“Well, Gregor, they’re not ordinary Catholics, are they? I mean, they’re not Mrs. O’Brien who lived downstairs from me in Boston and went to Fatima Novenas all the time and prayed that Michael would break down and marry me. You remember Michael. It was my great good luck that he never broke down and married me.”

“You’d have had to have married him at the same time.”

“In those days, I didn’t have any backbone.”

“The Cardinal,” Gregor said, “is the Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Colchester, which is in Upstate New York, not here. And he doesn’t call me in unless he has a corpse on his hands.”

“Would the Cardinal of
this
Archdiocese call you in if he had a corpse on his hands?”

“I don’t know if we’re in an Archdiocese,” Gregor said. “Believe it or not, I’m not an expert on the institutional structure of the Catholic Church in America. And since I have never met the occupant of this see—or the see St. Elizabeth’s College is in, if there’s a difference—I can’t understand why he’d call me in if something embarrassing happened to him. But it doesn’t matter, Bennis, because nothing embarrassing has happened to him, in that sense anyway. There are no corpses to discover, and no crimes to ferret out before they cause a nationwide scandal.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive,” Gregor said firmly. “Sister Scholastica would have said. I have your button buttoned. We ought to go.”

“Aren’t they building a gymnasium or something? Maybe their contractor is a front for the mob—”

“Bennis.”

“—or maybe it’s one of the nuns trying to put aside some money so she can make her escape—”

“Bennis.”

“—or maybe it’s something really sinister, like a plot to supply girls to the white slave trade in Arabia or a clandestine organization with links to the IRA. or—”

Bennis had left her pocketbook on the kitchen table while she waited for Gregor to button her. Gregor picked it up and handed it over.

“These are a lot of nice women we’re going to see, a perfectly respectable order of nuns that does a lot of good work in schools and hospitals. They are not prone to committing crimes or collaborating in vice.”

“They’ve already had one murder,” Bennis reminded him.

“Considering how that worked out, it proves my point,” Gregor said.

“I think of it like an allergy,” Bennis told him. “Some people have a tendency to break out in hives whenever they eat strawberries, and some people have a tendency to break out in murders whenever—well, you know, whenever the situation warrants it.”

Since Gregor Demarkian couldn’t imagine what sort of situation would warrant any group of people in “breaking out in murders,” he grabbed Bennis Hannaford by the shoulders, spun her around, and marched her straight at her own front door.

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN HAD A
driver’s license, and on one or two occasions he had even driven a car—but only on one or two occasions, because he was bad at it. He was so bad at it, in fact, that people on Cavanaugh Street did not bet on
if
he would receive a ticket when he took out a car, they bet on
what kind
. They did this in spite of the fact that Gregor did everything possible not to get behind a wheel.
People
magazine had dredged up his driving record from his early days in the Bureau, and a few of the stories his fellow agents had liked to tell about what happened when he was put in charge of a vehicle. That had been all the people of Cavanaugh Street had needed. On the day when Gregor had been forced to drive Lida Arkmanian’s ten-year-old niece Agatha to summer camp—because there was nobody else around with the time to do it—old George Tekemanian had won five hundred and fifty dollars for betting that Gregor would be stopped for turning the wrong way onto a one-way street from a no-left-hand-turn lane. Sheila Kashinian had won fifty dollars for betting he’d be given a Breathalyzer test. It was embarrassing, but there was nothing Gregor could do about it, except to drive as seldom as possible and allow either public transportation or his friends to take him where he wanted to go.

Bennis Hannaford was a very good driver—she was, in fact, one of the best coordinated people Gregor had ever met—but her idea of time spent not wasted in a car started at approximately one hundred and forty miles an hour. She took the double-nickel speed limit with all the seriousness Carl Sagan took Creation Science. By the time she drove Gregor into the visitors’ parking lot at St. Elizabeth’s College, he was shaking, and they were a good ten minutes early for the start of the reception. Gregor looked at the tall spires and graceful religious statuary that seemed to be everywhere around him and decided that he was no longer in doubt. There quite definitely was a God, and he could prove it by the fact that
he
was still alive. That there was a Devil he could prove by the fact that they had never been stopped by any agent of the Pennsylvania State Police. It wasn’t as if they would have been difficult to spot. Bennis’s preferred mode of transportation was a Mercedes 230 SL she had had custom painted a phosphorescent tangerine orange.

According to the map Sister Scholastica had sent them, the visitors’ parking lot was directly next door to St. Cecelia’s Hall, which was directly next door to St. Teresa’s House. St. Teresa’s House was the place where the reception and then the lunch were to be held, and therefore the place to which they were headed. Bennis pulled her keys out of the ignition and looked around. From here, as far as Gregor could tell, it was an ordinary enough suburban college campus. The statues of women in long veils marked it as Catholic. The marble arches of its college Gothic buildings marked it as both oldish and expensive. Other than that, it could have been any college at all. Gregor looked around for some sign that 5,264 nuns were now in residence, but couldn’t find any. He’d thought the grounds would have been carpeted with women in habits. The grounds weren’t carpeted with anyone. From what he could see of the lawns and pathways, they were deserted.

“You’d think there would at least be other people arriving for the party. I’m beginning to wonder if we have the wrong date.”

“We don’t,” Bennis told him. “There was one of those plastic letterboards at the gate when we came in. ‘Opening Reception, Convocation of the Order of the Sisters of Divine Grace, May 11, 12:45.’ And I’m quoting. I just think everybody else knows something we don’t know about the really good places to park. And there’s someone else in this lot, anyway. Over there.”

“That pudgy man getting out of the red wreck?”

“The red wreck is a vintage Jaguar. And the pudgy man is Norman Kevic. The one who’s on the radio, you know.”

“No,” Gregor said. “I don’t know.”

“Well, you ought to. He’s got a talk show in the mornings from six to ten. He’s very controversial and he’s supposed to be very influential. Anyway, I know he’s here for the reception because he’s been talking about it for a week. When he isn’t bashing the Japanese.”

“What do you mean, bashing the Japanese?”

“He tells really gross, really racist jokes about the Japanese.” Bennis shrugged. “I didn’t say he was a nice man. I just said he was famous. Get out of the car, Gregor. We really ought to go find out where we’re supposed to be. Once we’ve got that down, we can do what we want.”

Since this was eminently sensible advice—and since Bennis so rarely gave eminently sensible advice—Gregor decided to follow it. He opened the door at his side and unfolded his legs from the small car. Since he was six feet four, he always seemed to be unfolding his legs from one place to another. Once he was standing up, he nodded to Bennis, and she used her automatic door lock. Then she got her cigarettes out of her pocket and lit up. It was impossible to tell anymore where cigarette smoking would be allowed and where it wouldn’t be. Since Bennis’s habit was deeply ingrained and passionately defended, she was forever smoking precautionary cigarettes before entering parties, dinners, speeches, and television studios. Gregor was used to it. He leaned against the side of the car and waited.

“I don’t understand why you do this,” he said. “We could go over to St. Teresa’s House first. That was what you said we ought to do. You could always nip out later and light up. And instead—”

“Here comes somebody else,” Bennis said.

The somebody else was driving up in an ordinary maroon Lincoln Town Car, a dowdy second cousin to Bennis’s Mercedes and Norman Kevic’s Jaguar. Gregor watched idly as it maneuvered almost silently into a narrow parking space and hissed to a stop. Since the windows were tinted, he couldn’t see inside, and he wondered why not. What made people want to be anonymous, when they were unlikely to be famous enough for anonymity to be in question? Then the driver’s side door popped open and a man got out, and Gregor began to revise his opinion. The man wasn’t famous. He wasn’t anyone that Gregor recognized. Gregor was willing to bet, however, that he was richer than both Bennis Hannaford and Norman Kevic combined. The man walked around the back of the car and up the side to the front passenger door and opened it. He held out his arm, but the woman who emerged beside him did not bother to take it. She was a thin woman with overtight skin and the frantic air of the psychologically desperate. Gregor disliked her on sight.

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” she said, leaning over to take off a shoe and shake it in the air. “Gravel, gravel, and more gravel. Whatever made you think I liked gravel, I’ll never know.”

“I didn’t think you liked gravel.” The man spoke with some amusement. “I thought the members of the Heart Association Committee liked gravel. And I was right.”

“I don’t see why you think I’ll be impressed with the Heart Association Committee,” she replied. “If I’d wanted to be on the Heart Association Committee, I could have gotten there myself.”

“You didn’t get there.”

“I didn’t want to.”

“I think, Nancy, that at some point, you’re going to have to stop pretending that you don’t care what anybody else thinks of you. It’s all you do care about.”

Nancy had the shoe back on her foot. She spun around on her heel until her face was almost next to his and said: “I think, Henry, that I’m going to go in and tell the nuns what kind of a son of a bitch you really are, and then we’ll see what happens.”

At that she turned her back on him and stalked away, toward St. Cecelia’s Hall, across a drive so uneven and unpredictable it made her pitch and shudder with every step. The man watched her go for a second or two and then followed.

Gregor looked across the car at Bennis still smoking her cigarette and shook his head. Bennis took a deep drag, leaned closer over the car’s roof and said, “Do you suppose they didn’t notice we were here, or that they noticed but they just didn’t care?”

“B,” Gregor said.

“That’s what I think, too,” Bennis said. “New money. You can smell it all over them. New money fights in public. Old money fights in private. Very old money never fights at all. How’s that for social commentary?”

“Finish your cigarette,” Gregor said.

Bennis dropped her cigarette on the ground and stamped it out under her heel. Then she picked it up and put it in the flap pocket of her purse. She would throw it away as soon as she found a garbage can.

“I’m finished,” she said. “I can’t wait to see what those two are going to do when they have a whole order of nuns for an audience.”

I
F THERE WAS ONE
thing Gregor Demarkian had learned in his short—but very intense—acquaintance with the official branches of the Roman Catholic Church, it was never to anticipate the actions of a nun. He had once gone to Maryville, New York, expecting the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Divine Grace to be a quasi-medieval pile complete with bats in the belfry and ghosts in the downstairs back hall. Instead he found a functional building that reminded him of an elementary school. Now he was doing his best not to expect St. Teresa’s House to be other than what it was. The facade spoke softly of soaring ceilings and wide hallways inside. It would probably turn out to be a rabbit warren of tiny rooms partitioned with plasterboard. Now that they were this close, he could see all the other people he had expected to see in the parking lot and hadn’t. They were coming from somewhere behind the building, which meant Bennis had to be right. There was somewhere else to park. There seemed to be fewer people than he had expected, but he thought it made sense to revise his expectations. This was, after all, a nuns’ convention. It was the Sisters who were supposed to be here in force. Seculars could only be guests, not active participants.