Murder Superior(74)

“Homicide was what he wanted.” Rob Collins sighed. “You heard about how he arrested the nun, Sister Agnes Bernadette?”

“Yes, I did. Everybody did. It was on the news.”

“Right. Well, it’s a crock. A total crock. Androcetti’s got absolutely no reason to think she killed anybody except that she was the cook who handled the food, and even that’s crazy because the nun who was helping her handle the food was the nun who died.”

“Sister Joan Esther.”

“Right. And the thing is, he knows it’s crap. He knows it. He pulled it out of thin air as soon as he heard the television people were there. I think he was afraid you’d get a jump on the publicity.”

Gregor speared a piece of sausage and leaned back, contemplating the ceiling fan, contemplating the situation. “Let’s start from the beginning here,” he said. “Do you actually know you have a murder yet? Do you have the lab reports back?”

“I don’t have the lab reports back, but I talked to the medical people. A guy on our team named Ben Bowman heard you talking to that lady—”

“Bennis Hannaford?” Tibor suggested helpfully.

“No, not her. Some nun. About fugu. You know, Japanese puffer fish.”

“Mother Andrew Loretta,” Gregor said.

“Maybe.” Rob Collins sipped his coffee and winced. “Anyway, when Ben told me about it I went to the doc and gave it to him as a possibility, and what he said was that it sounded perfect and he’d test for it. The symptoms or whatever, I mean. If it turns out to be fugu, does it mean we don’t have a murder?”

“It would depend on where she got the fugu. From what I understand, the fugu was supposed to be prepared by a special fugu chef sent especially from Japan at a gazebo in the garden. It wasn’t to be left around for anyone to pick up anytime—which would have been a bad idea because fugu is extremely dangerous if it’s not handled properly. Since I know from talking to Sister Andrew Loretta that no fugu was being served yesterday at all—because the fugu chef was having a temper tantrum—my guess would be that Sister Joan Esther would have had to have been given it deliberately. Did anyone check the ice in the hollow of the ice sculpture’s head?”

“It melted,” Rob Collins said. “Somebody’s testing the water.”

“What about the chicken liver pâté in the other ice sculptures? What about the food that was already on the table?”

“Oh, we got all those. But Mr. Demarkian, couldn’t it have been a mistake? With the fugu, I mean. Couldn’t someone have picked some up by accident and then used it—”

“—in the chicken liver pâté?” Gregor shook his head. “I’m willing to bet anything that the pâté was made as a single enormous batch, and none of the rest of it was poisoned. I don’t know how the fugu was kept. I asked yesterday, but Mother Andrew Loretta wasn’t clear and I didn’t have the mobility I would have had under other circumstances—”

“Jack,” Rob groaned.

“Mmm. I think if you have fugu poisoning here you also have a murder here. I take it if you didn’t have a murder here, you’d be rid of Jack Androcetti.”

“You got it.”

“Sorry,” Gregor said.

Rob Collins shrugged. “It was a long shot in any case. I was pretty much resigned. Now that we do have a murder, though, I’m damned if I believe it was committed by that weepy nun we arrested yesterday. I bet she doesn’t even put out traps for mice.”

Gregor waved at Linda Melajian. Astoundingly, the pot of coffee was already drained. They needed more. Linda knew from across the room what they wanted and went to get it.

The two questions that interest me the most,” he told Rob Collins, “are who would have known that fugu was poisonous, and whether or not it was Sister Joan Esther who was supposed to be killed. The first is the kind of question that has no really hard answer.”

“Yes, it does,” Father Tibor said. “The answer is, ‘everybody in Philadelphia.’ It is on the radio, Krekor, it is on the radio all the time. From a man named Norman Kevic.”

“Good old Cultural Norm,” Rob Collins said.

“I’m beginning to wish I’d heard this Norman Kevic. What does he say about fugu?”

“He just makes a lot of racially offensive jokes about Japanese people dying from it,” Rob said. “If you’re asking does he say what it looks like or what part of it is poisonous, the answer’s no.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said. “Well, that leaves things up in the air, which is where I thought they’d be. Let’s get on to question number two. Was it really Joan Esther who was meant to be killed?”