Charisma (3 page)

“I think now was exactly when they’d write.”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Mary Jerome.”

Mary Jerome stared at the pamphlet Susan was unwrapping, glossy and four-colored and crammed full of pictures of the Virgin on a cloud,
GOOD NEWS FOR CATECHISTS
, was written across the top of it. “I would never have entered the kind of order where I’d be the one buying catechisms instead of Reverend Mother. I mean, why would I have bothered? What’s the point of being a nun if you’re going to run around in makeup and live in an apartment?”

Susan almost said: What’s the point of being a nun? But she had answers to that question, better ones than Mary Jerome had, and she could only have asked it out of spite.

She dumped the circulars back into their manila envelope and took out the only interesting thing, a small box wrapped in brown paper, the kind of box samples of toothpaste came in when you lived in a suburban house. It had been addressed by hand.

Mary Jerome eyed it, the envy plain on her face, turning her ugly. “Is that from one of your former students? If it is, it’ll be a tube of hand lotion. That’s what they always send. Scentless hand lotion.”

It wasn’t a tube of hand lotion. It was a five-decade rosary, made out of amber, a slightly more expensive-looking version of the kind of thing laypeople used when they said “a third part.” Mary Jerome’s eyebrows climbed up her forehead to the edge of her veil, making her look Neanderthal.

“Good Lord,” she said. “Who’d send a rosary to a nun?”

Susan closed her eyes and told herself: I am not a nun.

I.

Am.

Not.

A.

Nun.

Y
EARS AGO, LONG BEFORE
he was even old enough for high school, Pat Mallory used to come up to Edge Hill Road to see the houses. In those days, New Haven was a “nice” town, a half-city with an urban feel but a country rhythm. It was also solidly Catholic. With the exception of Yale, an Anglo-Saxon fortress spread out across Prospect and Chapel streets and tucked into the trees on the narrow offshoots of the business district, New Haven then might as well have been dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Maybe it had been. What he remembered most about those trips up the hill were the names on the mailboxes. Meehan, Carroll, Hanrahan, Burke: all those great stone houses, seven and eight and nine thousand square feet big; all those broad front lawns; all those long black cars; all of it, every piece of it, Irish. A year or two later, when Kennedy was inaugurated and the nuns at school opened every class by thanking God for putting a Catholic in the White House, Pat had thought he’d finally understood. Edge Hill Road was the kind of place people like the Kennedys came from.

Now, getting out of the car into the cold stiff wind of the dark December 2 morning, he half wished he were ten years old again. The great stone houses were still there, but they meant less to him than they once had. Everything did. Three abortive years on scholarship at a very expensive Jesuit college in New York had taught him that Edge Hill Road was not the kind of place Kennedys came from. It didn’t represent enough money, and it was too close to town. Seventeen years with the New Haven Police Department had taught him that New Haven wasn’t a very “nice” town, not anymore, and that it was getting less nice all the time. Lately he had begun to wonder why he was living in it. The neighborhood where he had grown up, with half a dozen brothers and sisters stuffed into seven rooms and a statue of the Virgin on the front lawn, was now a crack alley. The street in front of Holy Name School was lined with prostitutes. The Green was full of bums. Sometimes he felt like a science-fiction version of Rip Van Winkle: a man who has been asleep just long enough for his world to have turned into the antithesis of itself.

Still, it looked strange, a body stake here at the bottom of Edge Hill. Edge Hill might not be the kind of place Kennedys came from, but it was rich enough. There wasn’t a child on the street who went to a public school, and most of the girls “came out” in the most publicly possible way. Every spring, the backyards were full of striped caterers’ tents and dance bands imported from New York City. What they usually got up here was burglaries and breakins and driving-under-the-influence after nights on the town.

He slammed the door and waited for his driver to come around the car and join him. Now that he was chief of Homicide, he always had a driver, although he never had a car much better than the Buick unmarkeds he used to drive when he first got out of uniform. This driver was a boy named Robert Feld, still in uniform, black and much too young.
Much
too young. Sometimes the NHPD managed to sign on reformed street kids, hard boys who’d gotten religion, and they were always perfect. They knew the territory and they’d been leached dry of sentimentality in the womb. Robert Feld was the other kind. He had a degree from Storrs and a commitment to Positive Attitudes.

Pat let Feld come up to him, then pointed across the street. He looked away as he did it. Like most people, Feld made him nervous—because, like most people, Feld made him feel outsized. Pat Mallory was six feet six inches tall, two hundred and forty pounds, naturally bulked in the shoulders and naturally broad across the chest. He had never really worked out, because he had always been afraid to. In high school, he’d spent a year in mortal terror, convinced there was something wrong with his thyroid gland that was going to make him grow and grow and grow and never stop.

“Look,” he said. “Who caught this thing? They’ve got one of their lines tied to a lamppost.”

Feld blushed, then went patting around in his jacket pockets until he found a steno pad. He squinted at it. It was ten o’clock in the morning, but it wasn’t exactly light. The sky was crammed black with clouds. The streetlights, primed to turn off automatically every morning at seven, were giving off something like shade. It could have been the middle of a night when the moon was full, or the street was having a block party.

On Edge Hill Road, they didn’t have block parties.

Feld was getting into gear. “Conran and Machevski,” he said finally. “They’re who caught it.”

“They’re not Homicide,” Pat said. “Who do I have down here?”

Feld squinted again. Then he sighed. “I don’t know if I took this down right,” he said. “Ben Deaver. That’s right.”

Pat was sure it was. Ben Deaver was the highest ranking black in Homicide. He was also among the two or three smartest officers, of any color. Someday, soon, if Pat did twenty-five-and-out, Ben Deaver was going to have his job.

“The other one,” Feld said, “is a little fuzzy. Debero?”

“Dbro.” Pat sighed. “Jesus Christ.”

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind.”

“I’ve never heard of this—Dbro,” Feld said. “I’ve been driving you for five months, I’ve never heard of him. Is he new?”

“No,” Pat said. He looked across the street again. It was wide and deeply guttered. On any other day, it would have been choked with traffic. This morning it was choked with slush, a black river disappearing into blacker grates. The temperature was dropping again, just enough. In an hour or two, it would start to snow.

Pat left Feld where he was and crossed toward the line of police cars that had been parked to block the flow of cars and tourists. In the pocket of his jacket he had the note his secretary had written him after she’d taken the call that brought him down here: the first call, not the second. The first call was from Dan Murphy, the New Haven district attorney, the man in charge of media hype. He’d been on his way out of the office when that second one had come in. Now he wondered if he should have taken the time and answered the second call himself. It would have been Deaver, and Deaver always had something to say.

But the first call had been bad enough, even though it had been filtered through his secretary. He kept thinking about the note in his pocket and the fact that it would have to say now what it had said then. Dan was on the warpath, looking for a way to make the papers. That, coupled with Dbro, was the kind of disaster he did not need right before Christmas.

There was a body stake here at the bottom of Edge Hill Road, and the body staked had belonged to a nine-year-old boy.

Ben Deaver had taken his jacket and laid it across the hood of one of the black-and-whites. When he saw Pat coming, he picked it up and started to put it on. It was an automatic gesture, not meant. Pat shook his head slightly and Deaver put the jacket down again. Pat knew what was going on here, with Deaver at any rate. There were things you got used to after a while—things that, when you started out, held all the nauseating terror of the climax scenes in the horror movies you’d watched as a teenager. The things you did not get used to made you hot. Pat could remember himself in the back bedroom of that nursery school on Pinchard Street, looking at the pool of blood on the floor, at the smear of feces on the wall, at the cigarette butts clogging the drainhole in the sink. He had stripped off his jacket and his sweater. He had wanted to strip off his shirt. He had thought his skin was going to boil. Now, he thought, Ben Deaver was literally radiating heat.

At the other corner of the stake, Dbro was wearing his heavy sheepskin-lined jacket zipped to his chin and a pair of dogmuffs over his ears. Deaver kept darting little glances in his direction, startled, as if he’d been presented with a giant amoeba pretending to be the Ghost of Christmas Past.

“Jesus,” he said. “Nothing ever touches him.
Nothing
ever touches him.”

“Nothing ever did.”

Deaver nodded and sat down on his jacket. He looked tired and angry and half ready to cry. He’d looked much the same the first time Pat had ever met him. That had been ten years ago, when Deaver had been sixteen and of the (highly erroneous) opinion that he could turn himself into a creditable bag man.

These days, Deaver looked like he could have graduated from Yale. His hair was clipped short. His shirts always seemed to have just the right amount of starch in the collars, and they were always white. When he did paperwork he wore heavy black glasses and smoked a pipe.

He kicked the heels of his wing-tip shoes against the black-and-white’s fender and said, “I called that priest. You know, the one with the place down in the Congo. I thought he might be able to give an I.D.”

“Father Thomas Burne,” Pat said.

“Yeah. That’s the one. The kid—” Deaver looked over at Dbro again. The technical people were beginning to wrap up, beginning to move out, leaving a clear path to the body. They had been here for an hour, and they hadn’t been allowed to accomplish much. The photographers had gotten their photographs. The rest of them had been more or less on hold. They couldn’t do much work until the body was picked up. The body couldn’t be picked up until Pat had had a look at it. He had had his secretary call in and tell them that.

“The kid,” Deaver said, picking up the thread again, “has that look to him. The kind they all have over here. At Burne’s place. That look that seems to say ‘Victim for Sale.’ You know what it’s like. They all end up over at Burne’s place one way or the other.”

“When they’re this young they usually stay.”

“I know. But I had to try something. Christ, Pat, this is—I had to try something. I saw what we had and I nearly—”

“What?”

“I don’t know.” He had stopped kicking his feet. His hands were splayed out over his knees, twitching. “When we first got the call, I thought it was going to be, you know, one of them.” He gestured up Edge Hill. “I thought, Jesus, that’s what we need. Some little rich kid getting mugged, some little rich kid dealing dope. Then I got here and—”

“You’re sure it’s not some rich kid?”

“Positive. You look at him.”

“I will,” Pat said. “I don’t want to rag your ass, you know, but I’ve got a reason for asking. You’re not the only one who called me.”

“Who else called you?”

“Dan Murphy.”

Deaver’s face started shading into purple. The muscles in his neck were beginning to bulge. “Crap,” he said. “Crap and double crap.”

“I know.”

“What the hell did he want?”

“A chance to hog the publicity and make himself look like a crusader.”

“We don’t need him in this, Pat, we really don’t need him.”

“I know,” Pat said. “When I saw the address, I thought it must have been a kid from the neighborhood. Who else would get killed on Edge Hill? I thought it was because it was close to home.”

“I heard he lived up here,” Deaver said.

“Stone house right up there at the lip of the ridge. The one with the turrets.” It was a house Pat remembered from his childhood walks, but he wasn’t going to tell Deaver that. As far as he knew, he had never told anyone about those walks. He just took them again and again, in his dreams.

He flapped his arms against the cold and said, “So? You were telling me—”

“I was telling you,” Deaver said, “yeah. So. I got here and Machevski was puking all over the scene. Just sick inside out. That’s one thing. I thought we must have had a slasher, because you know how Machevski is about slashers, there’s just something about knives with him he can’t take, but—”

“Ben,” Pat said, “what do we have?”

Ben wrapped his arms around his chest, looked into the sky, looked uneasy. By now the technical men had all drifted away. The tourists on the edges of the police lines were starting to get bored. The body was lying in its aura of chalk, made difficult to see from where they were standing by the restless pacing of one of the medical examiner’s men. Deaver bit down on the inside of his cheek, hard enough so that Pat thought he was going to bleed.

“It was a hit.”

“What?”

Now that it was out, Deaver seemed to feel better. At least he had stopped biting the inside of his cheek.

“It was a hit,” he said again. “It was a classic hit. Gun to the back of the head. Kneeling position. The whole thing. If the kid had been nineteen instead of nine, I would have said high-level dope and old-line connections. Pat, go look at him. I know it sounds nuts, but it was a pro job. It was an expensive pro job.”