Murder Superior(25)

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.