THERE WAS A BOTTLE of Johnnie Walker Black behind the copy of Anna Karenina on Henry Hare’s bedroom bookshelf, and when Nancy Hare decided she wanted to go to bed that evening, she went right to it. Nancy didn’t sleep in Henry’s bedroom, and hadn’t for years, but she still treated it as her own turf. She borrowed his shirts to sleep in and his bathrobes to lie around the house in and his ties to try out various things she read about in The Joy of Sex. She never tried out anything from The Joy of Sex on Henry, because Henry didn’t think sex was a joy. He thought it was more of a responsibility. He thought it was like working at the office or paying his taxes, something he didn’t like to do much but was much too honorable to try to get out of. Of course, Nancy didn’t like to do it much, either, but there was something about Henry not wanting to do it that she found insulting. It was as if she lacked something fundamental that would make him behave like a normal human being.
Was it one of the ordinary duties of a wife, to make her husband behave like a normal human being?
The Scotch was in an unopened bottle. The bottle was unopened because Henry’s valet checked it every morning and replaced it if a drink had been taken out of it. A drink was taken out of it once or twice a month, when Henry wanted to make himself feel like James Bond. Nancy took one of the clean crystal drinking glasses out of Henry’s private bathroom—Henry had to have clean crystal drinking glasses to fill with water to clean his mouth out after he brushed his teeth, he also had to have brand new, never before used socks to wear every morning, because he’d heard that J. Paul Getty never wore a pair of socks twice—and filled it to the brim. She drank half of it down and topped it up again. Then she took a cigarette out of the gold box on Henry’s bureau and lit up with a gold Dunhill lighter. It was crazy. This bedroom was like some fantasy out of Penthouse magazine, except not so gross. The bed was the size of California and up on a platform. There was a switch in the bedside table that could make the ceiling panels turn until the ceiling had become a mirror. There were pillows the size of outboard motors tossed randomly on furniture and carpet the way the loaves of manna had been tossed from the Heavens. It was all calculated to seduce someone, but Nancy didn’t know who. Henry certainly wasn’t interested in seducing her.
She turned on the television and sat back to watch the eleven o’clock news. She didn’t expect to hear much more than what she had heard at six. It was all over town now, that a nun had died at St. Elizabeth’s. She’d even had phone calls about it. And Henry was furious. Henry was taking it personally. Henry thought it was all her fault, because she’d thrown those flowers on that nun.
That nun.
Nancy took a drag—they were English cigarettes, much too strong and much too harsh—and tapped her ash into the crystal ashtray in the shape of a fish that Henry kept on top of the TV set. Since he didn’t smoke, Nancy didn’t know who it was for, either. living around Henry was eerie. It was as if he weren’t himself at all, but an alien from outer space who had occupied the body of a much gentler, much more sophisticated man.
“A nun accused of deliberately murdering one of her Sisters at a Main Line convent is out on bail,” the woman on the TV said. “News coming up at eleven, right after these messages.”
The bedroom door opened and Henry stood in the doorway, his shirt off and his belt unbuckled, looking blank. That was eerie, too. If Nancy did something outrageous, Henry looked annoyed. If she didn’t—if she was nice, or neutral, or just not sufficiently obnoxious to get attention—Henry looked blank. Nancy had the odd feeling that she was never really there for him.
She had put the bottle of Scotch on the night table. She picked it up, topped her drink off again, and went back to watching the news.
“They let Sister Agnes Bernadette out,” she said, pointing at the set. It wasn’t necessary, but it was conversation. If she didn’t start one, he never would. “I wonder what happens now. Does she go back to the convent and act like nothing ever happened? Does she still cook?”
“How do you know she cooks?”
“She was cook at the convent when I was at St. Elizabeth’s,” Nancy said. “She’s been there forever. And if you want to know the truth, I don’t think she’d have had the heart to deliberately kill Hitler, never mind some nun everybody says she actually liked.”
“I thought it was some nun nobody knew,” Henry said. “Some nun from Alaska. I thought the point was that this Sister Agnes had gone off her nut.”
“Sister Agnes Bernadette.”
“I wish you wouldn’t drink at this time of night. When you drink, you always make a scene.”
Nancy’s cigarette was burned almost to the filter. That was something you really didn’t want to do with these cigarettes, because the closer they got to the butt the worse they tasted. They were supposed to be the most wonderful cigarettes in the world and they made her gag. She got up, got another one, and lit up again. She almost never smoked when Henry wasn’t around. She was addicted to nicotine only in his presence. It had something to do with the fact that when he saw her smoke he always worked around to lecturing her. She wished he would work around to something else, but he wouldn’t and she wasn’t going to ask for it. There was a time in this marriage when she had asked for it a lot and been turned down too often.
“There,” she said as she got back to the bed, “there’s Sister Agnes Bernadette. She looks miserable.”
“You’d look miserable, too, if you’d just been arrested for murder.” Henry had moved in from the doorway now and was standing next to his built-in wardrobe. He would leave his clothes over a chair and his valet would take them away in the morning. Someone would iron his underwear and someone would put creases in his trousers and someone else would make sure he found only the tie that went with the suit he was supposed to be wearing that morning.
“I’m surprised they haven’t come here asking to talk to you,” Henry said, “with that stunt you pulled and then disappearing on me so I couldn’t find you for better than half an hour—”
“I didn’t disappear on you. I just went to talk to someone.”
“Well, you were missing and you were still at St. Teresa’s House, and we were supposed to be gone. You don’t know how that burns me. She shouldn’t have asked me to go. She should have gotten rid of you and left it at that.”
“Why? Because you’re giving them umpteen jillion dollars?”
“Yes.”
“Some people don’t operate on a totally cash basis, Henry. Some people have other considerations.”
“I don’t give a damn what she considers for herself,” Henry said, “I only care what she considers for me, and I shouldn’t have been tossed out of that reception like a gate-crasher. I’m not a gate-crasher. I’m the man who made it all possible.”
“You didn’t have anything to do with the nuns’ convention.”
“That’s not what I meant. I’ve donated six million dollars in goods and services to this project of theirs. That college wouldn’t survive without me.”
“The college wouldn’t survive unless you built them a field house?”
“You really shouldn’t talk about money, Nancy. You don’t understand the first thing about it. You’re not competent.”
“I don’t see why anybody from the police should have wanted to talk to me,” Nancy said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever met this Sister Joan Esther. And nothing happened at all to the nun I threw the vase on.”
“Except that she got wet. And green. And ripped.”
“I know she got ripped, but I didn’t rip her.”
“You must have ripped her,” Henry said. “You were the only one there. You were probably so far out of control, you didn’t know what you were doing.”
“I am never that far out of control.”
“You’re that far out of control all the time. It’s your life. It’s what you do instead of working for a living.”
I couldn’t have ripped the scapular because I couldn’t have got to the scapular to rip it, Nancy thought, and it was true. The top of the scapular was concealed under the sweep of the long collar that covered the shoulder and part of the arms and all of the chest until the breast line. She couldn’t have gotten to the top of the scapular without ripping the collar off first—it ought really to be called a cape—or doing something so outrageous everybody would have remarked on it, like grabbing at Mother Mary Bellarmine in such a way that it would have looked like she was about to commit rape.
Her cigarette was burned halfway down. That was enough. Nancy put it out and went to get another one. Across the room, Henry was standing in nothing but a pair of Christian Dior underwear, looking more like the tall, handsome boy she had married than he had in years.
I used to be happy in this place, she thought. Then she lit the cigarette she was holding in her hand and turned away.
It was all indicative, really it was.
He had asked her for an explanation of what she had done to Mother Mary Bellarmine and she had given him an answer calculated to make no sense and he had not pursued it.
He considered her such a flake that it wasn’t worth his time to unravel why she did what she did, when or to whom.
He was so wrapped up in himself, he didn’t have time to puzzle out anyone else’s behavior or to consider it even for a moment in any light but the one that reflected on himself. To Henry, what Nancy had done to Mother Mary Bellarmine was to commit an act that got Henry Hare thrown out of a reception given by the Sisters of Divine Grace.
It all went around and around and it never got any better, and Nancy was sure it wouldn’t get better if she told him she hadn’t had a reason at all for throwing those flowers on Mother Mary Bellarmine.
“What are you staring at?” Henry demanded now.
Nancy decided to let that one ride, too.
If she started getting the hots for Henry Hare again, she was only going to come to grief.
IT WAS ELEVEN FIFTEEN on Mother’s Day night, and Sarabess Coltrane was worried. She was worried about where she was—which was on a dark street in downtown Philadelphia, alone, standing under a street lamp that seemed to have been dimmed down in front of a door that seemed to be lit by a spotlight—and about what she was about to do. She was afraid that when she went upstairs in this building somebody—a security guard or a secretary or somebody—would make her go away again. She was worried that when she saw Norman Kevic, he wouldn’t remember who she was. Most of all, however, she was worried about the conversation she had had with Sister Catherine Grace that afternoon, and with Norman Kevic too, when they were all working on the roses.
Sister Joan Esther was lying dead, and it had all happened exactly the way Sarabess and Catherine Grace had imagined it would. Norman Kevic had to remember that. They had gone into it all in detail. So far he hadn’t told the police, but Sarabess was sure he was going to. He would have to. He was famous and he probably had a stake in being a good citizen. Once he told, Sarabess was sure she’d be in all sorts of trouble, and Catherine Grace, too, because that police lieutenant was a real loose cannon, as Sister Scholastica had been saying all afternoon. Actually, Sister Scholastica had been saying a few other—and stronger—things, but it embarrassed Sarabess to remember them. Nuns weren’t supposed to talk like that.
If I don’t go in now, I’ll never go in at all, she thought.
She forced herself away from the lamppost and into the puddle of shadow just beyond it—surely it was much too small a puddle to contain a murderer or a rapist or a mugger or anything else human—and went to the door. The door was made of glass and framed in brass with the WXVE lightning logo etched into the glass just above the brass handlebar. Sarabess pushed against the handlebar, holding her breath. The door could have been locked. She had been listening to Norman Kevic live all the way into the city from St. Elizabeth’s. She had been listening to him while she parked her car and while she walked down the street to this door. She had been listening to him through the earphone of her little Japanese radio right. Up until about ten minutes ago, when she had started to work up her courage to go inside. Norman Kevic had to be in this building, but that didn’t mean the building wasn’t locked.
It wasn’t locked. Sarabess pushed her way into the foyer. She stopped at the little desk that blocked the way to the elevator and looked around. There was supposed to be a security guard or somebody. There was a clipboard on the desk with a signup sheet on it and people’s names and floors written in little squares in pencil. Sarabess looked around and saw no sign of a uniformed man or a gun-toting woman or anyone else. Whoever it is has probably gone to the bathroom, she thought. It wouldn’t be fair to just go on up. She went on up anyway. She went around the desk and to the elevators and jabbed at the buttons. The elevator doors opened immediately and she stepped inside.
This was the point at which things might have gotten sticky. Sarabess had never been in the WXVE building before, but since it was such a large building she was sure it wouldn’t be just for WXVE. There would be other businesses with offices on these floors, architecture firms and certified public accountants, and she had absolutely no idea who was where. If there was a directory in the lobby, she hadn’t seen it. Even if she had seen it, she wouldn’t have taken the time to read it. If she had, the security guard might have come back, and then God only knew what would have happened. Now she pushed a button at random—“fourteen” because it was really “thirteen” and Sarabess liked to be counterphobic—and prayed for rain. If it wasn’t the right floor, it could at least be a neutral one. It could be one where the security guard wasn’t roaming around looking for trouble.
The fourteenth was a floor belonging to Martin, Debraham, Carter, and Allenkoski, attorneys at law. The elevator opened onto a darkened foyer with a large oak desk in it. The desk had a rose pink felt blotter in the middle of it and a brass nameplate next to the phone that said, “Tiffany Moscowitz.” Sarabess pressed the button for twenty-two and held her breath.
On “twenty-two” she had a little luck. It didn’t belong to WXVE, but it wasn’t deserted, either. It belonged to a magazine called Greek World, and they must have been meeting a printer’s deadline for an issue. Sarabess knew all about printer’s deadlines. She had worked for an underground newspaper in college, and what she had come away from it with was the conviction that some members of the working class were worse than the capitalist class, and among those members were all printers. It was disgusting. If you went so much as a half hour over deadline they charged you all kinds of penalties, and then they made you pay time and a half on top of it. Sarabess was sure that every printer drove a Cadillac and smoked thick cigars, conspicuously consuming the environment.
Greek World had a logo that looked like a whirling dervish dancing on the top of the Parthenon. It was tacked to the back wall of their foyer in the form of an enormous oakboard poster painted in acrylic primary-colored paints. When the elevator doors opened, a young man was running by with a huge stack of mechanicals badly balanced in his arms. Sarabess hated to stop him. She knew the look on his face. It said he’d lost any control he’d ever had over his panic hours ago.
She had to stop him. She had no choice. She stepped out of the elevator, grabbed at the sleeve of his shirt and said, “Excuse me?”
The man with the mechanicals stopped. He looked around the foyer as if he had never seen it before. He looked at Sarabess as if he had never seen her before. In the second instance, he was right.
“Excuse me,” Sarabess said again. “I seem to be lost. I’m supposed to be going to WXVE—”
“That’s downstairs,” the young man said promptly.
“Downstairs where?”
“Depends what part of them you want Reception’s downstairs on ‘twelve.’ ”
“Good. I’ll go to reception.”
“Except nobody’s there. Only nine to five. Broadcast is on ten.”
“Fine,” Sara said desperately, “I’ll go—”
“They’ll never let you in there,” the young man said. “You don’t have one of those passes on your shirt.”
“But—” Sarabess said.
“You’d better go to ‘nine,’ ” the young man said. “Nobody knows that’s part of WXVE at all. The elevator opens on a little dinky foyer and the foyer leads to all the office warrens and nobody ever wants to go there if they don’t have business. Try ‘nine.’ ”
“Yes.” Sarabess stepped back into the elevator.
“Greeks are crazy,” the young man told her. “I thought I knew that because my mother is Greek, but I never really knew that until I got here.”
“Yes,” Sarabess said again.
The doors to the elevator closed again. Sarabess checked to make sure she had pressed the button for ‘nine’—it was lit up, in all that crazy talk she couldn’t remember doing it—and sank back against the wall. Her stomach felt full of glass. Her heart felt hollow. Now she was supposed to wander around through a warren of private offices, looking as if she belonged somewhere in them, which she didn’t, and trying to get—where? Were there internal staircases? Was Norman Kevic wandering around himself? In all this time she had wasted, he might have finished up and gone home. They’d said on the radio it was a special appearance just to talk about the murder. Sarabess didn’t know if you called time on the radio an “appearance.”
The elevator doors opened on ‘nine.’ The foyer really was dinky. It was also unmarked. Sarabess stepped into it and looked around. Nobody seemed to be in the offices beyond the foyer, if what they were were indeed offices. Sarabess couldn’t hear the sound of a single conversation or a hollowly buzzing phone.
There were three openings off the foyer, not doors but archways of a sort, badly made, like the ones in cheap tract houses. Sarabess went through the middle one and looked around. She was on a long corridor lined with cubicles. It was the kind of place she had always been afraid she’d get stuck working. She went on through as quickly as she could without feeling as if she were running, which was not very quickly. When you’re frightened, you always feel as if you were moving faster than you are.
The corridor of cubicles came to an end at a kind of intersection, with new corridors going to the left and to the right. Sarabess peered in each direction and thought she saw a light to the left of her. It was all so dark and sterile here and so hollow. She was suddenly reminded of the story Norman Kevic had told that afternoon of his search for a men’s room. The parallels were unmistakable and she started to laugh.
There was somebody down there in a cubicle, light on and all. Whoever it was—female, Sarabess thought—called out “Who is it?” in a voice twice as scared as Sarabess thought she could manage on her own.
“I’m sorry,” Sarabess called back. “I’m lost I’m supposed to find a man named Norman Kevic.”
“Oh, Norman. Good old Cultural Norm. Norm isn’t here this time of night.”
“Yes he is. He was a witness to the murder—”
“What murder?”
“There was a murder at a reception at St. Elizabeth’s College this afternoon. Really. I’m not a nut. You can check it out.”
“Norm was a witness?”
“Well, he was there. You know. He’s doing some kind of special broadcast right now all about it.”
“Just a minute.”
Sarabess listened to a set of beeps and wonks that she supposed was a phone, then to a murmuring voice whose words were unintelligible but whose tone rose by the minute. Then there was a sharp click and the cubicle voice called out: “What’s your name?”
“Sarabess Coltrane.”
More murmuring. There was another sharp click.
“That was Norm,” the cubicle voice said. “He said I was supposed to take you right up. Just a minute and I’ll be ready to go. You must have really made an impression.”
“What do you mean?”
An actual person emerged from the single lighted cubicle, a woman so young Sarabess could barely believe she was out of high school, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and a pair of hot pink plastic flip-flops that slapped against the soles of her feet.
“You must really have made an impression,” the young woman repeated. “I’ve never heard Norm talk like that about a woman. You don’t look like I expected you to.”
“Oh,” Sarabess said.
“Usually Norm is such a smarm,” the young woman said. “I take it you haven’t been to bed with him.”
“What?” Sarabess said.
“Never mind,” the young woman said. “Of course you haven’t been to bed with him. If you had, he’d have made you sound like a taxi dancer. Never mind. Let’s go.”
The young woman started down the corridor away from the intersection and Sarabess followed, feeling more confused than ever and wondering what she was supposed to make of it all. Apparently, Norman Kevic had rather liked her, or something. What was that supposed to mean?
At the moment, it was supposed to mean that he would let her in to talk to him, which was vitally important. Sarabess had to do something about that conversation she’d had with Sister Catherine Grace.
For the moment, she thought it would be just as well to get that done and see what came next.
If anything did.
IT WAS QUARTER TO twelve, and at St. Elizabeth’s Convent, almost everything was quiet. Compline had been sung. Final prayers had been said. A rosary had been started for the succor of Sister Joan Esther’s soul. If the habits had been longer and the Office sung in Latin, Sister Scholastica might have thought she had been transported to 1953—or 1553. That was part of what she loved best about being a Catholic and being a nun. She liked to think of all the women before her who would find her life utterly familiar and be able to live it themselves without hardly any adjustment at all. Even having a murder in the house might not have been too much of an adjustment Religious life in the Middle Ages and the High Renaissance was not the placid and well-regulated thing it became later. Sister Scholastica sometimes wondered if she would have found it more interesting than what she had now.
She went down the back hall of the visitors’ wing—visiting Sisters only, here; secular visitors got rooms in St. Francis of Assisi Hall—and let herself down through the door at the back there and then through the back door of the chapel. The light inside was very dim, but she could see Sister Agnes Bernadette nonetheless, kneeling close to the front with her back hunched over as if she’d acquired a bad case of osteoporosis in a matter of hours. Scholastica dipped her fingers in holy water, made the sign of the cross and went inside. When she reached the center aisle she genuflected in the general direction of the tabernacle and then hurried up to the front. If Sister Agnes Bernadette had been praying, Scholastica wouldn’t have interrupted her. Sister Agnes Bernadette wasn’t praying. Sister Agnes Bernadette was in tears.
Scholastica sat down on the pew and put an arm around Sister Agnes Bernadette’s broad shoulders.
“I thought this is where you’d be. I checked your cell to see that you were in bed, and you weren’t.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Whatever you’re going to do, you can do it a lot better if you’ve had some rest.”
“But it’s all so impossible.” Sister Agnes Bernadette raised her teary face to Scholastica. “I didn’t kill Joan Esther. I didn’t kill anyone. I don’t even think I killed them by accident, Sister, because then a lot of people would have died, wouldn’t they? Mother Mary Deborah ate almost all her chicken liver pâté by herself and there was nothing wrong with that.”
“I know,” Scholastica said.
Sister Agnes Bernadette sat up a little straighter. “I don’t think that poisonous man cares what’s true or not,” she said. “That Lieutenant Androcetti. I think all he cares about is getting on the television news.”
“Well, I’ll agree to that.”
“I don’t think he thinks I killed her either. I heard that man, that Gregor Demarkian, say that they weren’t absolutely a hundred percent sure there had been a murder. There had to be lab tests and an autopsy—oh, dear—an autopsy on Sister Joan Esther—”
“Now, Sister—”
“But you must understand what I’m saying,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “Nothing matters to that man except making an arrest and making news because as long as there’s a trial he’ll look good. I was thinking all this out while I was sitting in jail. As long as there’s a trial he’ll be fine, because when the trial comes out not guilty it’s just the prosecutor who will look bad. Not him. Sister, I—”
“It’s all right.”
“I keep trying to offer it up,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I keep telling myself there’s no help for it, I’ve been arrested and things will go along from here and there will be a trial, and because I’m not guilty of course I won’t be convicted, but in the meantime it will all be so awful, so awful, and so I keep trying to offer it up—”
Offer it up, Sister Scholastica thought. This was terrible. She hadn’t heard of anyone “offering it up” for years. Schoolchildren “offered up” the pains of scraped knees or the humiliation of not being chosen for the baseball team in a childish attempt to identify with the sufferings of Christ. Grown women were not supposed to “offer up” totally unfounded murder accusations and full-blown media-hype trials. At least, Scholastica didn’t think they were. Scholastica’s God was a good deal more sensible than the One worshiped by so many other people.
“Don’t you worry,” she told Sister Agnes Bernadette. “We’ll take care of it. We’ll get Gregor Demarkian to take care of it.”
“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.