Charisma (33 page)

“You’re the policeman,” Susan said. “Maybe I’m looking at it backward. Maybe he’s not picking on women he doesn’t know. Maybe he knows a lot of ex-nuns and he’s only killing the ones who do this kind of thing, the ones who were real nuns.”

“What?” Pat said.

“What’s that noise?” Susan said.

The noise was Pat’s beeper. He grabbed his jacket and pulled it into his lap. He got the beeper out and stared at it.

He was going to have to answer his beeper, because it was blinking red.

“Excuse me,” he said to her. “I’ve got to go find a phone,”

W
HAT HE SHOULD HAVE
done, Father John Kelly thought, was to have stayed safely home at the Jesuit rectory and read a book. After his evening with the bishop, what he was doing—standing on Dan Murphy’s doorstep in the dark, ringing the bell and getting more agitated by the minute—made no sense at all. Still, he was on Dan Murphy’s doorstep, and he was ringing the doorbell, and he had no urge to go home. At home there would always be the chance that the bishop would call and give him another sermon about briefing the visitors before they were shown into the Presence. Pat Mallory, it seemed, had not been well enough briefed—and neither had the bishop. He’d ended up having to listen to a lot of information he hadn’t known the first thing about. There was something in Father John Kelly that was very pleased with that, a kind of fierce exasperation very much like anger. The bishop sat there in the chancery, spiritual leader of a see that included one of the most violent and degraded cities in the United States—meaning Bridgeport, which was what Riley was supposed to be bishop
of
—and there was no damn reason on earth why he should have found child prostitution, police corruption, and the structural malevolence of the juvenile protection services a shock. It was Father John Kelly’s private but so far unexpressed opinion that the vast majority of the Catholic bishops in the United States lived in a time warp where FDR was still president, Al Smith was still a hero, and good Catholic laymen wanted nothing more exciting in their lives than a chance to meet the Pope.

He pressed the buzzer again, waited, got nothing, and tried the door knocker again. He couldn’t hear any sounds coming from inside the house, not even the sound of the bell. He had no idea if the damn thing was working. He picked up the door knocker and pounded that, just in case.

The bishop was on his way back to Bridgeport, riding in a big black car his predecessor wouldn’t have been caught dead in, with a car phone next to his hand and a bug up his ass. John Kelly rubbed his face with the palms of his hands. A bug up his ass. That was probably some kind of blasphemy. He didn’t really care. He tried the buzzer again, tried the door knocker again, stamped his feet. Somebody had to be home. Dan had to be home. John Kelly had called Dan Murphy’s office and confirmed that.

“Son of a bitch,” he said, to the air.

That was when he got an idea. He reached for the doorknob and turned it. He had expected to find the door locked. Instead, he found it open.

This was most definitely a sin of some kind, but he was too worked up to put a name to it.

In the foyer, standing on the black-and-white checkerboard marble, his agitation began to ebb away—and that was bad. Without it he lost what little self-assurance he had. He looked up the great curving staircase, to the dark on the landing. He looked through the pair of fifteen-foot-high double doors propped open in front of him, to the dark of what he thought must be the living room. He wasn’t sure. He had never been in this house before—odd to think of, considering how constant his relationship with Dan Murphy had been—and he didn’t have the first idea of where anything was. Or where anyone could be.

“You want to know who Victor Coletti is,” he said aloud in the silence. “You want to know who really owns WNHY-TV. You want to know what all that business is about.”

He was whispering.

He clamped his teeth shut, tight, hurting his jaw. He advanced to the double doors and looked into the room beyond them—a living room for sure. On the other side of it, curtains had been pulled away to expose a great wall of glass. Arc lights were lit across the long, narrow expanse of back lawn, illuminating a fountain and a garden house and a gazebo. There was a statue in the middle of the fountain, mock-Greek, a woman in flowing robes with one arm raised. He felt along the wall inside the left-hand door and found a switch.

It was when the light went on—an elaborate chandelier, spreading out over his head like George Orwell’s infamous chestnut tree—that he became sure he was being watched.

“Dan?” he said.

Dan didn’t answer, and neither did anyone else.

Out on the lawn, wind was rippling sluggish snow over the lawn. A line of pine trees was shivering and shaking at the back. The surface of the water in the fountain had hardened into ice. John Kelly reached for the pocket where he usually carried his cigarettes and found that he had forgotten to bring them.

“I want to know who Victor Coletti is,” he said again, and knew that was a mistake.

When the blow came it hit him squarely on the back of the head, like a flat thing falling, even as he knew it wasn’t a flat thing but a bullet. Sound and feeling wouldn’t mesh. Life and death wouldn’t mesh either. He felt himself suspended in time, half here and half there, like on that Christmas day when he had walked and walked until he had gone into a church. The priest was still waiting for him there, in the same black robes, with the same tired expression on his face—but what the priest was offering him was much clearer. Not an education. Not a life of safety. Not a vow of poverty with its secret promise of never, ever allowing him to get himself in debt. Not Victor Coletti, either, because Victor Coletti was a ghost.

There was a light up at the top of the world now and John Kelly could see it. It had started as a point and was spreading across all the darkness of space. In that light there was not only his history, but the answers to all his questions. He could turn back and see the man who killed him as surely as he had been able to see the chandelier the moment before he died.

The man who killed him was standing in the middle of the living room, tucking a gun into the waistband of his pants with one hand. With the other he was holding on to the shoulder of a small boy who looked frightened and frozen. There was no movement in the boy’s body at all, not even the rise and fall of breath. The man pulled the boy closer to him and spun him around.

“Stuart,” the man said. “Stuart, wake the fuck up.”

Stuart didn’t move.

“Crap,” the man said.

He spun Stuart back around again, pressed the nozzle of the gun to the base of the boy’s skull, and fired.

Up in the light, spinning away from it all, Father John Kelly thought how strange it was—that he had known this man and not known that he liked to dress in women’s clothes.

I
F THERE WAS ONE
thing Pat Mallory knew he couldn’t do, it was to bring Susan Murphy where he had to go. It was one thing to take the woman out to dinner and pretend she wasn’t who and what she was—a civilian and the district attorney’s sister. It was another thing to haul her along on what was going to be a royal mess. Pat Mallory knew about the messiness because he knew every possible intonation in Ben Deaver’s voice, and Deaver had sounded close to hysterical.

“You aren’t going to believe this,” Deaver had said, “you’re not going to believe what he did this time.”

“What did he do this time?” Pat had asked him.

Deaver had been in no mood to talk. There was a lot of noise going on in the background, police noise. Pat heard someone laughing and was sure it was Dbro. Dbro was enough to make Deaver nuts all on his own. Pat wished he could think of some way to get Dbro off the force, or transferred to Miami, or wounded in the line of duty. Even watching Dbro getting cited for heroism wouldn’t hurt if the bottom line was that he’d no longer be carrying a shield. Unfortunately, Dbro was the kind of cop who never got wounded in the line of duty. He didn’t give enough of a damn to take any risks.

“Ben?” Pat said.

Ben didn’t answer.

“Ben,”
Pat said again.

Somewhere in the distance, a man was shouting, frenzied and angry and close to violence. “Cordon it off,” he was screaming. “Cordon it all off. Do it now. Get those goddamned civilians off the goddamned crime scene and do it goddamned quick you fucking assholes what does the city pay you for?”

“Pat?” Ben said. “We’re out on Sullivan Street. Do you know where that it?”

“Yes.”

“You better get out here fast. There’s a patrolman named Dunbar who’s lost it completely, I think he’s going to shoot someone, for God’s sake.”

“What’s the—”

“Pat, just get down here, will you please? You can see it when you get here. Just get here.”

“I’m with a woman and I’ll have to—”

“Put her in a cab.”

Ben Deaver hung up.

I
N THE END, PAT
Mallory didn’t put Susan Murphy in a cab. Edge Hill Road wasn’t exactly on the way to Sullivan Street, but it was in the same general direction, and this was another ex-nun he’d just gotten a call about. It didn’t matter which theory he used, his original one or the one he’d been developing since Susan gave him all that information about ex-nuns. Neither theory exempted her from attack. Neither could, because they both ended up at the same place, except that the second one gave him a name and a face, a name and a face he had heard and seen for the last time on the day he met Susan at Damien House.

Coming back across the restaurant, he grabbed their waitress and threw a wad of money at her—too much money, but it didn’t matter. Coming back to the table he grabbed Susan and pulled her to her feet.

“We’ve got to get out of here now,” he said. “I’m taking you home. I’ve got to be someplace.”

“Is it another one of the boys?”

Pat shook his head and pushed her toward the door. “Another one of the women. Run, Susan, we’ve got to move it. Something’s gone haywire.”

She was a good girl, a good woman, a brick, whatever. She practically ran out onto the street and down the sidewalk to where he had parked the car—parked it illegally, too, for once not caring who got upset. He found something funny in the fact that he had always refused to do that when he was on official police business, and had finally fallen when he was on his own time.

She got to the car before he did, waited while he came up with the key, and then climbed inside without expecting him to help her in. He let her get on with it, and climbed into the driver’s seat himself. As he started to pull away from the curb, she got her cigarettes out and lit up again.

“One right after the other,” she said. “That’s—faster than he usually is, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Pat said. “The first body was destroyed before we made the connection. I think he’s always been pretty fast.”

“I wish I knew what he was doing,” she said. “It seems so crazy, killing women because they used to be nuns.”

“He is crazy,” Pat said. “He has every right to be crazy.”

“What?”

He didn’t answer her. It wasn’t that far from George and Harry’s to Edge Hill, and he was pushing it—not running the siren, but definitely pushing it. He wasn’t afraid of being stopped. There wasn’t a patrolman in the city who didn’t know his car. He went down one one-way street and then another, around corners, around curves, automatically taking the route most likely to be clear of traffic. He went across Prospect Street with his horn blaring but his eyes straight ahead. He didn’t have time to check on what might be coming at them through the intersection. A few seconds later he was sitting in front of her house with his motor still running and his gear still in drive.

“Go inside and lock the door,” he told her. “Don’t come out until I come to get you.”

“Pat—”

“Go.”

She went. He watched her run up the walk, fumble with her keys, stand back and look at the front door. For a moment, he thought he was going to have real trouble. She was going to have brought the wrong keys and there was going to be nobody inside to let her in. Then she went back to the door, fumbled around for a few moments and got the damn thing open. He jerked the steering wheel to the left and took off again.

It was nine o’clock at night and the city of New Haven was dark and cold and crazy—and deserted. If he’d been down in the Congo, the streets would have been packed. In the respectable parts of town there was nobody. He got to the bottom of Edge Hill, and finally hit Chapel Street: He also hit his siren.

From the sound of Ben Deaver’s voice on the phone, Pat Mallory had expected at least a minor riot. That happened sometimes, either because the crime scene was too public and the civilians in attendance stampeded, or because the crime scene was in one of those sections of the city that didn’t like cops on principle. Sullivan Street was not a dislike-cops-on-principle sort of place. Pat had heard that other cities had trouble like that in their Hispanic neighborhoods, but New Haven never had.

Pat Mallory definitely expected to find civilians stampeding. It was disorienting to turn off Chapel onto Sullivan and find only a small knot of old women in bathrobes, clutching rosaries and looking near tears. In the face of that, his siren felt ridiculous. He turned it off.

The old ladies were not only clutching rosaries, they were saying them. One or two of them had looked up when they’d heard him coming—they could hardly have helped hearing him coming—but by the time he had parked the car and was climbing out, they were bent over their beads again. Pat looked at the building they were standing in front of and saw that there was a uniformed patrolman there, doing sentry duty. The patrolman’s lips were moving, as if he were saying a rosary, too.

Pat walked up to the building, then up the steps of the stoop—why was it all the buildings in New Haven had such high stoops?—and said, “Ben Deaver in there?”