Murder Superior(24)
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.
3
EXACTLY 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.
Chapter 2
1
GREGOR 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.