Murder Superior(84)

“I was questioned by the police,” Norm said quickly.

“Well, now you’re going to be questioned by the Catholic Church. Norm, I’m beginning to get very, very—I don’t know. But I am. Are you going to go into hiding?”

“Of course I’m not going to go into hiding,” Norm said. “I’ll be there in less than half an hour.”

“You will?”

“Of course I will. I just have a couple of things I have to do first.”

“I’m glad you’re coming,” Sarabess said. “I want you to come. When he was asking questions like that, I didn’t know what to do.”

“Mmm,” Norm said.

“He’s a very strange man,” Sarabess said. “He keeps walking around muttering to himself that he needs a knife. Sometimes I wonder if he isn’t a little cracked. Crazy, I mean. Dangerous.”

“Gregor Demarkian is always dangerous,” Norm said.

“I’m glad you’re coming,” Sarabess said.

Norm was glad he was coming, too. He was also glad he had an automatic lock button on his console that worked the door, because without it he would never have made it out of his chair in time to make sure Steve couldn’t get into the booth. His phone had three separate lines, too, which meant that he didn’t have to answer the one Steve was going to call him on any minute now just to get a line free to call out. He picked up his phone and called his car, from which his driver answered in a sleepy voice that indicated he’d been camped out in the driver’s seat waiting to go home. Norm considered the fact that staying up all night on no cocaine at all was practically as tiring as staying up with all you could snort, and what that fact meant for his future. It might mean nothing. Sarabess was organic, but Norm thought he could talk her out of that. He thought he could talk her into a haircut, too.

He told his driver to be at the south elevator door to the garage in fifteen minutes. Then he hung up, waited for a dial tone, and punched in the number for the local police. He had that number—along with the fire department, the FBI, the state capitol, the Roman Catholic Chancery, and the offices of the Philadelphia branch of White People’s liberation—on an automatic dial pad. He kept them on an automatic dial pad because he sometimes used them on his show. He could still remember the day he had called the Chancery pretending to be the Pope and caused a scandal so bad, the Papal Legate had come to visit him at the studio.

The phone was picked up on the police end by a young woman with a voice like strawberry syrup. Norman Kevic contemplated the ceiling of his booth and thought of green stains on white tablecloths and flowers wrapped in tissue paper and tied up with bright blue bows. The young woman went through her patented spiel about which branch of which government service he might actually be looking for, and then Norm told her.

“I’m looking for Jack Androcetti? I have some information for him about a homicide he’s working on?”

That, of course, was not entirely accurate, but it would get him put through to Androcetti, and that was really all Norm cared about.

After he’d had his little talk, he could go out to the car and get driven over to St. Elizabeth’s, where he would do his best to protect Sarabess and be on hand for any breaking developments at the same time.

Jack Androcetti, he thought, and made a face.

At least Jack Androcetti was better than Gregor Demarkian.





2


FATHER STEPHEN MONAGHAN HAD seen many odd things in his day, but he thought the oddest was certainly this gathering of the tribes that had begun taking place on the sidewalk outside of St. Teresa’s House and was now spilling into the foyer and out the back of the reception room door. It wasn’t a gathering of the Order. The Order was still as large as it had ever been, and still as ubiquitous on this campus. Coming over to St. Teresa’s House from the little landscaping shed where he had finally found Frank Moretti, Father Stephen had seen dozens of them, in pairs and triples, walking on every available walkable surface. Their black veils flapped in the wind and their rosaries made an odd clacking noise whenever they were brushed by the wind. Father Stephen was reminded of the days before Vatican II, when he had said Mass every other Sunday at the chapel of the Motherhouse of a large Order of religious women based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The Sisters had come to and from chapel, to and from meals, to and from sleep, in perfect ordered rows, clacking all the way.

Frank Moretti didn’t remember the Church before Vatican II. Frank was only twenty-three, and he thought of all nuns as sort of odd. There was no religious awe in all of this. The young gardener thought of all virgins as odd as a matter of course.