Charisma (15 page)

“Contracts that look too good to be true?”

“Contracts, period. We don’t do a lot with television contracts in Hartford, but David was with Burroughs and Barthe in New York. He did a lot of work for media people there.”

“Maybe I ought to just sign this thing,” Kelly said. “If Victor’s got an ulterior motive for giving the store away, at least he’ll be giving it away to the Church.”

“In the meantime, he might be doing the Church a lot of damage. See David Murrow, Your Excellency.”

“I will.”

David Murrow was the Protestant lawyer.

The cab pulled up to the curb in front of the building that housed the diocesan offices, and John Kelly got out. Francis Quinn. David Murrow. Victor Coletti. The names swirled around in his brain in no particular order, seeming all of a piece. Victor Coletti was a thief, but Francis Quinn was one, too. David Murrow was a valet to thieves. Something. John Kelly was very tired. Since Victor Coletti had sent him that letter with the offer in it, he had been having trouble getting to sleep.

He pushed through the revolving glass doors into the lobby and headed for the elevators. There was a woman waiting there, a tall woman in a black wool coat and boots with very high heels, but he didn’t pay any attention to her. There were doctors and lawyers in this building as well as Diocesan offices. Their clients always seemed to be wandering in and out, looking lost.

He pressed the up button and thought about Dan Murphy, who would now be forever connected in his mind with Victor. They were of a piece, too, although not in so obvious a way as Victor and Quinn.

The elevator was taking forever to come. He unfolded Rodez’s newspaper from under his arm and started to read it. He had just gotten to the part about the crazed killer stalking the streets of the city when he felt a hand on his arm.

He looked up, and the woman in the black coat was watching him. She was very pretty but getting old. There was gray at the roots of her hair and a nest of crow’s feet at the side of each eye.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Are you Bishop John Kelly?”

“That’s right,” Kelly said. “I am.”

She took her hand off his arm and looked away and said, “I’m Catherine Sargent. I need you to listen to something I have to say.”

A
T FIRST, JOHN KELLY
thought the woman had come to ask him to help her find a job. Finding jobs for people was a surprisingly large part of his work, a part he’d never considered before coming up here. Down in the diocesan office in Bridgeport, he’d been protected from all that. He’d been assigned to the bishop for “theological investigations.” He’d spent his time wading through encyclicals and dispatches from Rome, trying to figure out how to fit them into an American context. He’d come to the decision that, for Rome, there was no American context. The Italians understood as much about the United States as he did about electromagnetism, meaning nothing; Ratzinger was better. The Polish Pope was worse. Sometimes he’d lain awake nights wondering what it would be like to set an Italian cardinal down in Bridgeport for a year, anonymously, and make him live like everyone else. He kept getting visions of nervous breakdowns in working-class bars and psychic breaks over the morning newspaper.

By the time the elevator reached his floor, he had changed his mind. He’d seen a thousand job-seekers, and she didn’t have the look—not even the look of someone come to ask for someone else. She stood in the very middle of the car with her high stacked heels close together and her arms hanging motionless at her sides. Her blond hair had been cut to look as if it had been curled into a pageboy. Her black gloves were lined with cashmere. His assessment was reflexive: money but not serious money; a woman who had married a man in law or medicine.

The elevator doors opened onto a wide hall that opened onto the diocesan offices’ reception area, and they both stepped out. Through the archway, Kelly could see Marie at her desk, sullen and bleary-eyed, looking off into space with all the mental alertness of a catatonic on Thorazine. Marie was the daughter of one of those Important Catholic Laymen Kelly could never get himself to like. He was stuck with her until she decided to elope again. The last time, she’d eloped with the ex-mental patient who served as the lead singer in her favorite local punk rock band.

Kelly turned to Catherine Sargent. “My office is through there,” he said. “I’ll have to talk to my secretary—”

“I’m not going to be put off,” Catherine Sargent said. “I’ll sit in your lobby all morning, but I’m not going to be put off.”

“I don’t want to put you off,” John Kelly said. And it was true. Too many of the people who came looking for jobs had histories that sounded like his own. He could sympathize, but he could never make himself feel comfortable with them. They scared him. Worse, listening to them was like listening to his mother’s soul, an ectoplasmic stream of suffering and complaint. Catherine Sargent was something different, if not exactly something friendly.

She was also looking at him as if she didn’t believe a word he said. He gave her a little smile and led the way into reception. Marie had straightened up at her desk—she must have heard them in the hall—and was doing her best to look competent and awake. She looked ferocious instead. John Kelly never ceased to be surprised that she had married as many times as she had, three or four at last count. She was as ugly and intractable as a wart.

He took off his coat and hung it on the rack in the corner, one of those homey touches the diocese was convinced would make the Faithful more relaxed. Whether it did or not, Kelly had never been able to tell.

He turned back to find Marie looking suspiciously at Catherine Sargent. Marie hated pretty women, in any shape or form.

“You’ve got to answer a lot of calls,” Marie said. “The bishop even called. Himself.”

Kelly doubted this. It would have been one of the bishop’s aides who called, Father Blank or Father Dolan, even if the bishop meant to get on later and do the talking. Bridgeport wasn’t much of a diocese, but the bishop was meticulous about protocol.

“Dan Murphy called, too,” Marie said. “And that man who calls all the time now. Vincent Carlucci.”

“Victor Coletti,” Kelly said automatically.

“Him.”

Kelly kept himself from sighing out loud by force of will. It only made things worse, he knew that from experience. Marie could go from passively to actively hostile in no time at all. He turned to Catherine Sargent, standing in the middle of reception with her coat still on, and said, “This is Mrs.—Ms.—Sargent. She’s going to come into my office for a little while. When we’re finished, I’ll answer the bishop’s call.”

Marie stared at him for a moment, then stared at Catherine Sargent, then stared at Catherine Sargent’s shoes. “The bishop said you were supposed to call him right back. As soon as you got in.”

“The bishop has no way of knowing when I get in.”

“She doesn’t even have an appointment. You’ve got a page of people set to see you. Your day’s all booked up.”

“Obviously it’s not booked up now, Marie. There’s nobody here.”

“I think you ought to call the bishop back right away. He said somebody had been murdered.”

Catherine Sargent’s eyebrows rose practically to her hairline. John Kelly blushed. The bishop must have been paying more attention to the news than he had, and taking it more seriously. Rodez’s paper was still in his hands, unread. But none of this was really important. It couldn’t be, unless a priest or nun was suspected of being the killer. If that had been the case, Rodez would have said something about it. All this was was a blip on the radar screen, a problem with an almost untraceable connection, an incident that would require a press release. He turned his back to Marie and smiled at Catherine Sargent.

“I don’t know if you saw the papers this morning, but there seems to be a serial killer in New Haven.”

“I saw the papers.”

“He’s had two victims, and they both were ex-nuns.”

“I’m glad I’m not an ex-nun.”

“Yes,” John Kelly said, nonplussed. “Yes. I’m glad I’m not one either.” He turned back to Marie. “I’m going into my office and have a talk with Ms. Sargent. I don’t want to be interrupted by any calls. Not even calls from the bishop.”

“I can’t lie to the bishop,” Marie said.

“You don’t have to lie to him. You can tell him the truth.”

“He’ll be insulted.”

“No, he won’t.”

“I’ll bet she isn’t even Catholic,” Marie said. “She doesn’t look Catholic.”

Kelly wanted to ask her what Catholic looked like, considering the fact that the Church had nearly seven hundred million members spread without exception across the surface of the earth. Instead, he walked past her desk into the short hall that led to his office, motioning Catherine Sargent to follow.

In his office, Catherine Sargent finally took off her coat. She draped it over the back of one of his two visitors’ chairs and walked around a little, reading the titles of the books in his bookcase and the caption under the woodcut that hung on his east wall. She was wearing a dress as black as her coat, but with a white collar and cuffs that made her look as if she’d just escaped from a Swiss boarding school. When she reached the statue of Mary she reached out and tapped it lightly. It made Kelly wonder if she was checking to see if it was solid.

She came back to his desk, sat down in the chair she hadn’t thrown the coat on, and folded her hands in her lap. “As I told you downstairs,” she said, “my name is Catherine Sargent. I take it the ‘Sargent’ isn’t familiar to you.”

“No,” Kelly said. “It isn’t.”

“The girl at the desk was right, you know. I’m not Catholic and I never have been. I’m not anything. Religious.”

“Most people aren’t, these days.”

“I suppose you’re right. In this country, at least. My husband is the same way. I think he was raised Presbyterian, but I’ve never known him to go to church. We were married in my parents’ house by a justice of the peace.”

“All right.” What was this about?

Catherine Sargent shifted, just slightly, in her seat. “Three years after we were married, we had a child. A son we named Robert. He was the only child we had. I don’t want to get personal here, but I wasn’t capable of having any more. The way things turned out, I think I’m just as glad. Robert turned sixteen at the beginning of last October.”

“And?”

She shifted in her seat again, then looked away. Her pocketbook, a black shoulder-strap just large enough to hold a wallet and a set of keys, sat at her feet. She stared at that.

“Excuse me,” she said finally. “Would you mind if I smoked?”

“Of course not.” Kelly was surprised. Women like this didn’t usually smoke these days. Smokelessness had become a badge of their class.

She leaned over, got her pocketbook off the floor, got her cigarettes out. Kelly got the ashtray out of the top drawer of his desk and pushed it across to her.

“My husband,” Catherine Sargent said, “would tell you Robert has changed. I don’t think that’s true. When he was small, I used to wonder if he was mildly autistic. He didn’t do that rocking thing autistic children are supposed to do, but he—lacked affect. He’d cry when he was physically hurt. Beyond that, if he had any emotions at all, I never saw them.”

“That doesn’t sound like autism,” Kelly said. “With the autistic, there’s supposed to be a lot of anger.”

Catherine Sargent nodded. “I know. That’s what the doctors told me when I took him, and that’s what my husband says when I bring this up. My husband thinks Robbie was just—shy.”

“What did the doctors think?”

“They thought I was imagining things. Sometimes they thought worse. One of them suggested I go into therapy myself.”

“Did you?”

“No.” Her cigarette had grown a long column of ash. She tapped it into the ashtray and took another deep drag. Then she looked at it as if she couldn’t imagine where it had come from.

“I quit smoking these things nearly ten years ago,” she said. “I started up again last month. I was back on two packs a day in under a week.” She took another deep drag and shook her head. “When my husband came home and found the living room full of smoke, he thought somebody had died. He thought Robbie had died. He almost had a heart attack right there.”

“I take it Robbie hasn’t died.”

“No. I almost wish he had.”

“Because he—lacks affect?”

Catherine Sargent laughed. “Oh, dear,” she said. “He doesn’t seem to lack affect anymore. He’s got more emotions than I knew existed. It’s just that none of them make any sense. Do you know a priest named Father Thomas Burne?”

“Yes, of course.” Kelly was surprised again. Burne was a saint to street kids and the police department, a demon to the county social workers, an enigma to the Church, but he was not a casually famous man. Where would Catherine Sargent have heard of him? If she’d been Catholic, he could have put it down to the diocesan newsletter or the Catholic Charities mailing list, but she wasn’t. In fact, it was hard to tell what she was. It was impossible to tell what she felt.

He watched her stub her cigarette out, get another, and light up again. Her lighter was one of the gunmetal gray Zippos women used when they’d been to private school. In the glare of the flame, her skin looked as thin as paper.

“When Robbie was fourteen,” she said, “he started to get very aggressive. If it had been heavy metal rock or punk clothes, I could have understood it. Half my friends have children who look like they’ve been sleeping on park benches. Robbie went the other way. We had him at the Thorne School. We were talking about sending him to Deerfield. He’d always been bright even if he’d always been—strange. One day we noticed he’d started coming home with—things. Clothes, mostly.”

“Clothes,” John Kelly repeated. He was doing his best to sound very wise, but he was thoroughly bewildered. He had no idea what this was leading up to.

Catherine Sargent blew a stream of smoke into the air. “My husband and I are well off, but we’re not rich. He’s an accountant in private practice. We can do what’s important to us if we set priorities. We had enough to send Robbie to Deerfield and maybe to the Ivy League if we didn’t waste the money on other things. We gave Robbie a reasonable but not generous allowance. When Robbie started coming home with the clothes, designer clothes, expensive clothes, we thought he was stealing them.”