Murder Superior(91)

“Marvelous,” Bennis said. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on? Would you like to clue me in to who and what and where and why and when? I mean, I’m only the person with the most interest in this sort of thing that you know.”

“It’s easy,” Gregor said pleasantly. “All you have to know is not only who is dead but who was supposed to be dead.”

“You mean you think it was supposed to be Mother Mary Bellarmine who was killed after all?”

“I mean I hear police sirens.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s supposed to mean that one of my suspects seems to have called lieutenant Androcetti. I’ll talk to you later, Bennis.”

“But—”

“I’ll talk to you later.”

“If I had a penny for every time you promised to tell me later and didn’t, I’d be richer than my father was.”

Bennis’s father was dead. Gregor hung up the phone and walked out of the phone booth to the front door of St. Cecelia’s Hall. From there the siren sounded too loud and too urgent, better suited for an air raid than a college campus. The nuns had heard it just as surely as he had and had come out to look. When he’d first come over, Gregor had imagined St. Cecilia’s Hall to be empty, but it most surely hadn’t been. Nuns were coming out of doors and out of corridors, down stairs and out of rooms. Their habits were all virtually identical, mostly black, and disturbingly mobile, so that each and every nun looked like a flag blowing in an unseen breeze.

Gregor wormed his way past the nuns standing in the doorway and onto the front steps. Now he could see nuns coming at him from every side of campus, moving across the lawns and sidewalks with eerie grace, looking like nothing so much as the reconstituted pod people in the first version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Since nuns were nothing like pod people, at least in Gregory’s experience, he ignored the image and concentrated on the patrol car.

It was a patrol car, too, not an unmarked one, with a flashing bubble light on its roof and a pair of uniforms in the front seat. It pulled to a stop in the midst of the arguing Hares, practically knocking Nancy Hare to the ground. She jumped back and bumped into Mother Mary Bellarmine. Mother Mary Bellarmine jumped back, too, then tottered forward and seemed to grab Nancy Hare around the throat. A second later, she had righted herself again and begun to brush off her habit in a furious attempt to retrieve her dignity. The patrol car’s two front doors popped open and a pair of glum looking uniforms got out. A second later, one of the back doors opened and Jack Androcetti catapulted himself onto the pavement. He was wearing a lightweight wool summer suit with very tiny red lines on a grey background. He reminded Gregor of the kind of kidnapper who went into office-supply stores to type his ransom notes on IBM Selectric demonstrator models.

Androcetti shoved his hands in his pockets and began to bellow.

“Demarkian,” he shouted. “Demarkian, where are you?”

Gregor Demarkian sighed. Every nun in the area knew where he was. They were looking straight at him. Jack Androcetti was staring up into the branches of the tree that spread out above his head. It could have been a metaphor for the man’s entire career.

Gregor decided to give him a break of sorts.

“I’m right here,” he said, as he walked down the front steps of St. Cecelia’s Hall and started down the sidewalk to the patrol car. “I’m coming.”

It was one of those mistakes you can make only once or twice in a lifetime. It was one of those mistakes that can kill you.

Jack Androcetti was not interested in conversation, or in solving the case, or in finding out what was really going on here. Jack Androcetti wasn’t interested in anything but solving problems the way he’d always been able to solve them before.

As soon as Gregor Demarkian got into range, Jack Androcetti pulled back his fist and let loose with a right-upper cut.





3


ONE POTATO, TWO POTATO, three potato, four.

Gregor felt the impact on his jaw and that was what he thought.

One potato, two potato, three potato, four.

It was crazy.

Jack Androcetti had a big fist. His aim was terrible and his technique was nonexistent, but that didn’t matter. He was huge and he was fierce and he connected. Gregor’s ears rang and rang, like a car alarm going off in the night. On the other side of the little crowd of people now gathered around them, Gregor saw Norman Kevic begin to fade carefully out of the group, headed for safety, headed for open space.

“Wait,” he said, through what seemed to be blood filling his mouth. What if he’d lost a tooth? “Wait,” he said again. “Stop—”