Murder Superior(75)

“She’s the one who’s dead,” Rob pointed out.

“I know.” Gregor sighed. “I was in law enforcement for twenty years. She’s the one who’s dead, and that should be definitive in most cases. But in this case it bothers me. The pâté was put in the ice sculpture on the assumption that Mother Mary Bellarmine would take the first bite of it on a cracker during a kind of half-ceremony that was supposed to open the buffet Did Jack Androcetti get that much?”

“He did,” Rob Collins said, “but somebody told us that this Mother Mary Bellarmine had gout and couldn’t eat the chicken liver pâté—”

“But not everybody knew that, don’t you see? And if you didn’t know that, and if you were intent on killing Mother Mary Bellarmine, you would have had a fairly clear shot—or you would have thought you had. And I can think of half a dozen reasons why someone would want Mother Mary Bellarmine dead. I can’t do the same with Sister Joan Esther.”

“Well, I can’t find any reason for that. Sister Agnes Bernadette to have killed Sister Joan Esther,” Rob Collins said. “Jack seems to be treating this like a psychotic break. Sister went a little nuts. Sister put some poison in the lunch pâté. Chalk it up to sexual repression.”

“Did he really say this thing?” Tibor asked.

“Jack chalks everything up to sexual repression,” Rob Collins said. “But you know, Mr. Demarkian, it’s odd what you said, about Mother Mary Bellarmine. Before Jack pulled his stunt with the arrest, I was doing a lot of hard looking at Mother Mary Bellarmine.”

“Why?”

Rob Collins picked his jean jacket up from where he had dropped it on the bench between Tibor and himself and rummaged around in the pockets. He came up with a small stenographer’s notebook and began to flip through it.

“Sister Joan Esther,” he said slowly, coming to rest on a page full of what looked like the tracings of chicken entrails, “was a nun in the Provincial House in southern California that Mother Mary Bellarmine is the head of. I’m making a hash of the hierarchy, I know, but bear with me. Nuns get assigned to houses and work out of those houses under religious superiors. Mother Mary Bellarmine was Sister Joan Esther’s religious superior in this place, that was up until about a year ago. Anyway, at about that time Sister Joan Esther requested a transfer, and when a posting came up in Alaska she took it. The posting in Alaska was the only one that came up, and the first one, but if she had waited a month or two she could probably have gotten something else—”

“Possibly she was interested in going to Alaska,” Gregor suggested.

“Not according to my sources,” Rob Collins said. “According to my sources, she was interested in getting away from Mother Mary Bellarmine, pure and simple. She—Joan Esther—was at this Provincial House for about a year and a half, and in all that time she and Mother Mary Bellarmine did nothing but fight.”

“About what?”

“About everything, as far as I was able to tell. The way a habit should look. How to teach a class in English as a second language. If it was a nice day.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “This sounds classic.”

“It got even more classic. One day, Sister Joan Esther writes to Reverend Mother General at this main house they’ve got in Maryville, New York—”

“Motherhouse,” Gregor said.

“—and she makes it a very long letter, and the next thing anybody knows, this Reverend Mother General goes out to California to pay Mother Mary Bellarmine a visit and apparently to give her a dressing down. According to one of the women I talked to—not a nun, a secretary at the college—anyway, according to her, the rumor is that this Reverend Mother General threatened to start proceedings to have Mother Mary Bellarmine removed from her post if Mother Mary Bellarmine didn’t start to behave, and Mother Mary Bellarmine responded to this by blowing up at Sister Joan Esther. Then Sister Joan Esther went to Alaska, and everything calmed down until they met again last week. At which point, my secretary claims, it became perfectly obvious that Mother Mary Bellarmine hated Sister Joan Esther with a passion. Which leaves me with a couple of very interesting questions.

“The first one being, why was Sister Joan Esther the one to carry the ice sculpture to Mother Mary Bellarmine’s table when Mother Mary Bellarmine hated her so much? You know what the simple answer to that is, don’t you? It was sheer coincidence.

“I was wondering if it could be a backfire,” Rob Collins said. “I was wondering if Sister Joan Esther could have been trying to murder Mother Mary Bellarmine, and then when Mother Mary Bellarmine didn’t die maybe she thought she’d done it wrong and not poisoned the pâté at all, and then she took a taste and—wham.”