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Murder Superior(71)

By:Jane Haddam


“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.





Chapter 4


1


IT 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.