Charisma (34 page)

The patrolman didn’t ask his name, or for any kind of identification. Pat didn’t remember ever seeing him before, but he supposed he must have.

“Lieutenant Deaver’s in the hallway,” he said. Then he swiveled his head around until his chin was practically on the back of his shoulder and said in a puzzled voice, “
Everybody’s
in the hallway.”

Pat went past him and through the building’s front door.

Everybody
really was in the hallway—not only Ben Deaver and Dbro, as Pat had expected, but half a dozen patrolmen and a man from the medical examiner’s office and three techies. The techies were holding their equipment bags and looking mutinous. Ben Deaver had his back against the staircase and his arms crossed over his chest. He looked determined.

“Pat,” he said, when Pat came in. He moved a little away from the staircase, and as he did the techies moved toward it. He moved back again. “Pat,” “he said again. “God, I’m glad you’re here.”

“I thought we had a riot on our hands,” Pat said.

“We’ve got a problem on our hands, at least,” one of the techies said. “He sent the ambulance away.”

“We didn’t need an ambulance,” Ben Deaver said.

“He won’t let us call for the morgue car,” one of the other techies said. “He won’t let us into the scene. He won’t let anyone do anything.”

“
I’m
not going to take the responsibility for this when the shit hits the fan downtown,” the first techie said. “And you know it’s going to.”

An explosive wheezing sound came from one corner. Pat turned and saw that Dbro was there, doubled up, laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. There were tears in the corners of his eyes that threatened to spill down over his face and start a deluge.

“Oh, God,” Dbro was saying, “Oh, God. The shit hits the fan downtown. You better believe the shit hits the fan downtown on
this
one.”

Pat turned back to Deaver and raised an eyebrow. Deaver shook his head.

“Come upstairs, Pat. There’s something I’ve got to show you.”

The stairway was steep and narrow. The hallway it ended at was long and narrow and led to a single closed door and the stairs to the third floor. Pat hadn’t known what to expect this time—after the riot that never was, he didn’t want to guess—but part of him was vaguely confused by the cleanliness of all of it. Part of him thought the place ought to be covered with great globs of blood. Deaver stopped in front of the single door on the landing and got out the white gloves.

“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he said. “The outside knob is hopeless. The uniforms that caught the call came blasting through here with guns drawn or something, I don’t know—”

“What call?” Pat said.

Ben Deaver sighed. “He called, Pat. He went down to a phone booth someplace and he dialed 911 and told us she was here.”

“Tonight?”

“Of course tonight.”

“He killed her tonight and then he called?”

Deaver hesitated. “I think maybe he killed her yesterday. Not too long ago, anyway. She’s—you’ll have to see her.”

“How do you know he was the one who called?” Pat asked.

Ben Deaver hesitated again. Pat began to feel uneasy. Ben Deaver was not a hesitant man.

“The thing is,” Ben said, “I don’t think it could have been anyone but him who called. When the uniforms got here the door was locked, bolted from the inside. He must have gone out the window in the kitchen onto the fire escape. I can’t see any of the ordinary people on this street doing that.”

“It could have been an ordinary sneak thief doing that. Coming in, finding something he wasn’t prepared to deal with, getting on the phone to 911.”

“I know. Pat, I talked to the dispatcher at 911.”

“And?”

Ben Deaver didn’t answer. He turned his back to Pat and faced the door, so that he was blocking it as he had blocked the stairs.

“Pat,” he said, “I know what I sounded like on the phone. I know you must think there’s carnage in there. There isn’t. She’s just like all the other ones. Amber rosary on her coffee table. Strangled and then cut on the forehead with that Catholic thing. There really isn’t anything weird about the body except that maybe it gives you the feeling he didn’t like her much.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“With the others, he always seemed to be really careful about the way he laid them out,” Ben said. “He
positioned
them, sort of. With this one, he just stuffed her into a chair. She looks uncomfortable.”

“She’s dead, Ben.”

“I know. I’m just telling you it isn’t anything he did with the body that’s the problem. It’s not—he hasn’t gone on a frenzy. He hasn’t popped his cork that way. I know you’ve been worried—”

“Ben, what the hell
is
the problem?”

Ben Deaver turned the knob, pushed the door open and stepped back.

“Go ahead in,” he said. “Go ahead in and take a look.”

For one split second, Pat Mallory resisted. Everything in him resisted. He felt as if he’d been slammed into one of those force field walls his nephews were always so excited about on “Star Trek.” Then he made himself push through it and walk into the room.

In spite of what Ben had said, Pat had expected blood, a lot of blood, not this tired old woman crunched up in an overstuffed chair, the carving on her forehead as clean and crisp as the acid etching on a lithograph plate. She was right in front of him, just beyond the door’s swing, almost blocking his path and his view to the rest of the room. Almost, but not quite. As soon as Pat Mallory raised his head, he saw it. Saw
them.

Someone had turned on all the lights in the living room, overhead fixtures and table lamps, making the room look like a photograph gallery—because that was what there were, photographs. Dozens of them. Everywhere. Taped to the curtain that covered the front windows. Tacked to the walls. Strewn out over the tables and the couch and the floor. Black-and-white photographs taken with a good camera by someone who knew what he was doing. Black-and-white photographs with perfectly balanced contrasts and sharp, unmistakable images. Black-and-white photographs of grown men and very young, very naked boys.

Ben Deaver came up behind him. “Look at this,” he said. “Remember that talk we had? How you liked the street rumors, the business about that kid Charlie Burton escaping from a bugger house and then they were killing the others to warn him off—except that sounded too extreme, killing so many of them just because one had run off? Well, Pat, take a look at this. Of course they killed the others to warn Charlie Burton off. Of course they did. They had to do something.”

“Right,” Pat Mallory said.

He reached out and took the photograph closest to him. It was a photograph of Billy Hare and a man he didn’t have a hard time placing as the hotshot psychiatrist Dan Murphy had sent down to the scene on the death of Ellen Burnett.

“When Charlie Burton left his stable,” Pat said, “he took their goddamn blackmail file with him.”

W
HAT HAD HELD SUSAN
Murphy up at the door, when Pat Mallory dropped her off, was the simple fact that the door was unlocked. It had never in her memory been unlocked before at night, even when her parents were alive and New Haven was a relatively safe place. She pushed the door open, went into the foyer, and looked around, feeling a little afraid. There were so many robberies these days, and so many crazy people committing them, she thought anything might be inside. Nothing was. The foyer was empty. When she walked across it and looked into the living room, that was empty, too, although there was something about it—. She turned on the chandelier and saw nothing. The furniture. The floor. The rug. There was a sour smell in the air, sharp and antiseptic, that reminded her of the heavy-duty cleaners they used to use to clean the floor of the cellar in the convent. Certainly convents were the only places where people still cleaned cellar floors.

She walked around the living room, confused, and then walked out, turning off the chandelier behind her. The foyer was still empty and the house was still quiet. She thought for a moment about going to the kitchen to get herself a cup of tea. Part of her imagined Pat coming back, late but before dawn, to talk to her. It was stupid and she knew it. Things hadn’t gone that far—they hadn’t even mentioned that thing she’d said, that morning at Damien House—and she knew enough about police work from novels and movies to know that Pat wasn’t likely to be free anytime in the next twenty-four hours.

She might have made herself a cup of tea anyway, but, strangely enough, she was finally tired. She went upstairs instead, wondering vaguely why it had finally hit her now. The upstairs hall was dark and she flicked the switch that turned on the small lights that lined its ceiling. At the door to Andy’s room she hesitated. She didn’t want to talk to him, but she wanted to talk to somebody. There was nobody on earth she could call. That was what seventeen years in a convent would do for you.

She went down to her own room, opened the door, and turned on the light. She saw the rosary right away, lying in the middle of her pillow like the chocolates the maids on cruise liners left for passengers before bed. It was the amber one that had come in the mail on the day she left the convent for good.

It was an amber one just like the amber one someone had given Marietta O’Brien.

Susan walked over to the bed, picked up the rosary, and stared at it. She was just about to put it down again when she heard her brothers in the hall.

“Be quiet,” Andy was saying, “be quiet, for God’s sake, that light’s coming from Susan’s room.”

“I don’t give a damn where that light’s coming from,” Dan said. “You’re out of your mind, do you know that? You’re crazier than Daddy was.”

“I can’t be crazier than Daddy was, I’m sober.”

“You’re drunk on blood, you stupid, psychopathic asshole.”

In her room, Susan put the amber rosary carefully back on her pillow. They were coming down the hall, the two of them, and one of them—Dan, she thought, it would be Dan—was pounding his fist against the wall as he walked. They were whispering but they were loud. The odd acoustics of the house took care of that.

“I had it all set up,” Dan was saying. “I had the whole goddamn thing set up. It took me months to work it out. It took me weeks to put together. I had that bastard neutralized—”

“You had that bastard on television.”

“I had him where he couldn’t do anything to save Tom Burne’s neck, you fuck.”

“He still can’t save Tom Burne’s neck.”

“He’s a dead body, you roaring fool. And we’ve got another dead body we don’t even know what the hell to do with—”

“Stuart went over the edge on me. He was useless anyway.”

“Stuart wouldn’t have been God damned useless as a corpse if you hadn’t offed him in my own living room.”

“Fuck that,” Andy said. “Fuck everything. As soon as I get my gear together, I’m going to go over to The Apartment and fuck my brains out my ears.”

“You fucked your brains out your ears when you started all this.”

Tom Burne. Dead bodies. Somebody Dan had put on television.

Tom Burne.

Susan was sitting on the edge of her bed. The rosary was back in her hands. She couldn’t remember how it had gotten there. Down the hall she heard a door swing open and then stop, dead, as if someone had cut the thread of sense and put an end to sound.

The next thing she heard was Dan, part howl, part scream, a stream of words coming out in no particular order whatsoever.

“Dear sweet Lord fucking Jesus Christ in heaven what the hell is going on here dear sweet Christ fucking—”

Andy burst out laughing.

A moment later there was nothing, nothing, no words, just the sound of feet moving heavily on the floor of the room down the hall and then the sound of something tearing. Move, Susan told herself. You’ve got to move. She got off the bed and went to the door, opened up, and looked out in the hall. There was nothing there but the light streaming out of Andy’s room. Shadows moved through that light that she knew were her brothers, but they might as well have been ghosts. Move, move, move, she told herself again. Move, move, move. And then she did.

She went out into the hall. She went down the center of the runner, moving carefully, moving slowly, making no noise. She was at Andy’s door before she wanted to be, standing just to the side of it so that they didn’t see her. She could see them, pacing in and out of view. Andy’s room looked different, but she couldn’t put a finger on why. The walls seemed to be the wrong color. She moved closer to get a better look, still going impossibly slow, impossibly silently, and then it clicked—

Photographs.

Hundreds of photographs everywhere.

Photographs on every surface, on every piece of furniture, even stuck into Andy’s mirror like prom invitations on a popular girl’s vanity.

Her eye caught one and stuck to it, held to it, made her mind take it in.

It was an eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white of a tall man bending over a child. The child was on his knees and doubled over at the waist, his rear end in the air. The man’s pants were open and down around his hips. The man’s penis was sticking into the air, dark and erect, but he wasn’t doing anything with it. What he was doing was bringing a thick leather strap down on the boy’s behind.

The man was her brother, Daniel Robert Murphy.

She did what she did next without thinking about it. If she had thought about it, she would have run. She walked instead, up to the open door, up to the empty place where they would have to see her, where she would be exposed. She rounded the doorjamb and stopped, practically slamming into Dan’s chest. He was pulling photographs off the recliner and tearing them to shreds.

Andy was all by himself in the middle of the floor, holding a set of boy’s clothes that looked rumpled and dirty and crusted with blood.

When Andy saw her, he smiled, reached into his pocket, and came out with a gun.

“Did I ever tell you,” he said, “that I always wanted to shoot that goddamned
look
off your face?”