Murder Superior(61)

“I could get you a small room with chairs,” Sister Scholastica said. “No desk. This isn’t that kind of building.”

“I’ll take it,” Jack Androcetti said.

“It’s through that door at the back to your left,” Sister Scholastica said, going forward to show him the way. “There’s a hallway there with some rooms off of it.”

Gregor watched Jack Androcetti take in the decorated door, the picture of the Virgin, the blue ribbons. Then he turned around and looked at the door on the right, which was even worse. If Jack Androcetti had been that kind of man, Gregor thought, he would have fainted dead away.





2


IF JACK ANDROCETTI HAD been a halfway decent policeman, Gregor wouldn’t have spent the next two hours wandering around the back garden and along the strip of grass that allowed passage from the back garden to the sidewalk at the front. Androcetti knew Gregor had caught the body as it fell. Any policeman worth his service revolver would have taken that and run with it Gregor had never liked the kind of detective story where the police were made to look like absolute idiots. To his mind, they exhibited a particularly obnoxious form of class snobbery and a total disregard for reality. Even the Nero Wolfe books—which he liked because Wolfe was fat and proud of it—annoyed him because of their portrayal of the police. What he was supposed to do with a case where the police really were idiots, he didn’t know. He consoled himself with the knowledge that Sergeant Collins at least seemed to have a brain in his head. How much good that was going to do anyone, Gregor didn’t know.

Lieutenant Jack Androcetti set himself up in the room Sister Scholastica had found for him and began summoning witnesses. He still didn’t know he had a murder on his hands, but he was determined to proceed as if he did, which was standard policy in most police departments. Nobody wanted to be caught in the middle of an investigation that had been ruined because it had never been properly started, although God only knew it happened all the time. Unfortunately, in his zeal not to have anything to do with Gregor Demarkian at all, Androcetti was calling every nun anyone had seen anywhere in the reception room at the time, and those interrogations were going to take hours. Gregor looked around the foyer and saw that Bennis had disappeared. She was probably out smoking another cigarette somewhere, which was what she always did when she got agitated. He looked for Sister Scholastica, but failed there, too. Scholastica was so tall and that hair of hers was so red, Gregor had thought he might be able to pick her out even in the middle of all these habits. If she was here, he didn’t see her. He looked through the crowd for anyone at all he might know, and found no one. All the habits had begun to blend together and take on the visage of one enormous nun.

Gregor went to the front door, looked out on more crowds of nuns on the sidewalk and a couple of television crews unloading Minicams, and went down the steps in search of Bennis. It wasn’t true that there were nothing but nuns in the tight little groups that dotted the sidewalk like misplaced clusters of decorative shrubbery. Seculars had been invited to this reception, and as soon as Gregor started looking for Bennis, he saw lots of them. He dodged an elderly woman with a handbag that seemed to be made entirely of seashells and a young man in a pink and green tie that clashed outrageously with his electric blue shirt. Both the old woman and the young man were wearing those little pins that said ON MOTHER’S DAY REMEMBER THE MOTHER OF GOD. Gregor had read that message so often lately, he was ready to say a Novena. He pushed through the crowd some more, careful to stay to the building side of the pavement so that he wasn’t too flagrantly exposed to the newspeople.

He had just decided to try going around to the back when he got held up by a knot of nuns with their heads together, whispering frantically to each other and ignoring everything going on around them. He was about to excuse himself and push past when his gaze lit on a face he was sure he knew. It took him a while to retrieve it, in spite of the fact that he had seen this woman more than once today and recognized her before. That was what looking at thousands of habits could do to the mind’s ability to recognize anything at all. Then the name came to him and he brightened. Sister Mary Alice. That’s who that was. Sister Mary Alice, good friend of Sister Scholastica and Mistress of Novices at the Order’s Motherhouse. Gregor abandoned his attempts to get by the knot of nuns and made his way in the other direction instead.

Sister Mary Alice was standing by herself, almost all the way down the sidewalk to St. Cecelia’s Hall. Gregor walked up to her and cleared his throat. She seemed a million miles away, and throat clearing didn’t get her attention. He drew up closer to her and said, “Sister?”