How Like an Angel (23 page)

“That's a matter you will have to settle with your own con­science. Your lack of intention changes nothing. A flooding river does not intend to overflow its banks, nor an iceberg to ram a ship, yet the farmlands are ruined by flood and the ship sinks. Yes, the ship sinks. . . . And the people on it, they all die. Yes, yes, I see it quite clearly in my mind.”

“I'd better leave now.”

“They are screaming for me to help them. The ship is broken in two, the sea is boiling with anger. . . . Don't be afraid, my children. I am coming. I will open the gates of heaven for you.”

“Good-bye, Master.”

Quinn walked away, his heart pounding against his rib cage as if it were trying to escape. His throat felt swollen and there was a taste of old vomit in his mouth, shreds and pieces of the past too fibrous to be swallowed.

He saw Karma running toward him between the trees awk­wardly, as if she had not yet become accustomed to her new body.

She shouted at him, “Where's Master?”

“I left him at the Tower.”

“Sister Blessing's sick. Oh, she's terrible sick. And Brother Tongue is crying and I can't find my mother and I don't know what to do. I don't know what to
do.”

“Take it easy. Where's the Sister?”

“In the kitchen. She fell on the floor. Oh, she looks bad, she looks dying. Please don't let her die. She promised to help me get away, she promised just this morning. Please, please don't let her die.”

Quinn found Sister Blessing on the floor, doubled up with pain. Her mouth was drawn back from her teeth, and a thick colorless fluid flowed from both corners, too much of it to be ordinary saliva. Brother Tongue was trying to hold a wet cloth against her forehead but she kept twitching her head away and moaning.

Quinn said, “How long has she been like this, Karma?”

“I don't know.”

“Was it before lunch, after lunch?”

“After. Maybe half an hour after.”

“What did she complain of?”

“Cramps. Very bad cramps, and a burning in her throat. She went outside and vomited and then she came back and fell on the floor, and I screamed for help and Brother Tongue was in the washroom and he heard me.”

“We'd better get her to a hospital.”

Brother Tongue shook his head, and Karma cried out, “No, no. We can't. The Master won't let us. He doesn't believe in—”

“Be quiet.” Quinn knelt beside Sister Blessing and felt the pulse in her wrist. It was feeble, and her hands and forehead were hot and dry as if she had lost a great deal of body fluid. “Can you hear me, Sister? I am going to drive you to the hospital in San Felice. Don't be frightened. They'll take good care of you. Remember that hot bath you told me you wanted? And the fuzzy pink slippers? Well, you'll be able to have all the hot baths you like, and I'll buy you the fuzziest pink slippers in the country. Sister?”

She opened her eyes slightly but there was no recognition in them, and a moment later the lids dropped shut again.

Quinn got to his feet. “I'll bring the car as close to the door as I can.”

“I'm coming with you,” Karma said.

“You'd better stay here. See if you can get her to swallow a little water.”

“I tried to and so did Brother Tongue, only it didn't work.” She followed Quinn outside and down the path, talking nerv­ously and glancing over her shoulder as if afraid someone was watching. “She was so happy this morning. She kept singing about how there was a good day coming. She couldn't have felt sick or she wouldn't have been singing like that. Why, she even said she—she felt full of life and hope. Only then she got mad at me because I told her you were co
ming back to bring the lotion for my acne. . . . Did you?”

“Yes, it's in the car. She didn't like the idea of me coming back?”

“Oh no. She acted scared, sort of, and she said you were our enemy.”

“But I'm not your enemy, or hers. In fact, Sister Blessing and I got along very well together.”

“
She
didn't think so. She said you were back at the gambling tables in Reno where you belonged and I wasn't to take your promise seriously.”

“Why was she scared, Karma?”

“Maybe because of O'Gorman. When I mentioned his name she looked ready to throw a fit. It seemed like she didn't want to be reminded of you or O'Gorman—you know, like she thought things had been settled and didn't want to hear about them anymore.”

“Like things had been settled,” Quinn repeated, frowning. Only one thing had been settled, the fact that O'Gorman had been murdered. “Is mail delivered to the Tower, Karma?”

“Three miles down the main road, where you turn off to the neighboring ranch, there are two mailboxes. One of them is ours, but the Master only goes to it about once a week since nothing important ever comes.”

“If mail is delivered, it must also be picked up.”

“We're not allowed to write a letter unless it's real im­portant, such as to right a wrong we committed.”

To right a wrong,
Quinn thought.
To confess a murder and make peace with God and conscience.
He said, “Did Sister Blessing ever talk about her son?”

“Not to me. I know she has one, though.”

“What's his name?”

“I guess the same as hers used to be, Featherstone. Maybe Charley Featherstone.”

“Why maybe?”

“Well, when Brother Tongue came in after she'd fallen on the floor she looked at him and said ‘Charley,' like she meant him to tell Charley she was sick. That's how it sounded to me.”

“Could she have been addressing Brother Tongue as Charley?”

“That wouldn't make sense. She knows as well as I do that his name's Michael. Michael Robertson.”

“You have a good memory, Karma.”

She blushed and made an awkward attempt to hide the blush with her hands. “I don't have much to remember. The only reading I do is the Master's record book when I'm looking after Mother Pureza. I read it aloud to her sometimes like I would a story. It keeps her quiet except when she interrupts to ask if the people lived happily ever after. I always tell her yes.”

It was to Quinn a strange and touching picture, the girl earnestly reading a list of names and the deranged old woman listening, hearing a fairy tale:
“Once upon a time there was a woman called Mary Alice Featherstone and a man called Michael Robertson—” “And did they live happily ever after?” “Oh yes, happily ever after.”

He said, “Is Charles the real name of any of the Brothers who are here now?”

“No. I'm sure of that.”

They had almost reached the car. The girl ran ahead of Quinn and opened the door. With a cry of triumph she picked up the bottle of lotion that was lying on the front seat and held it against her face as if it could work its magic even through glass.

She whispered, half to herself, half to Quinn, “Now I will look like other girls. And I'll go to Los Angeles and live with my aunt, Mrs. Harley Baxter Wood. Isn't that a beautiful name? And I'll go back to school, and I'll—”

“Live happily ever after?”

“Yes, I will.
I will
.”

Although Quinn was able to maneuver the car between the trees right up to the kitchen door, it took all three of them, Karma and Brother Tongue and himself, to get Sister Blessing into the back seat. Brother Tongue put a folded blanket under her head and a moist cloth across her forehead. This time she didn't twitch away or moan in protest. She had lost conscious­ness.

Both men realized it was a bad sign but Karma didn't. “She's gone to sleep. That means the pain must be better and she's going to be all right, doesn't it? She'll live happily ever after, won't she?”

Quinn was too busy to answer, and Brother Tongue said, “Shut up,” in a voice that had a squawk in it, like a door hinge long unused, unoiled.

The unexpected sound, and the fury behind it, shocked Karma into silence.

Quinn said to Brother Tongue, who was wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his robe, “Do you think there's any danger of her falling off the seat?”

“Not if you drive slowly.”

“I can't afford to drive slowly.”

“The gates of heaven are opening for her? Is that what you're saying?”

“She's very ill.”

“Oh God. Please God, grant an easy end to her suffering.”

Quinn got into the car and started down the slope to the dirt lane. In the rear-view mirror he could see Brother Tongue down on his knees praying, his hands lifted toward the sky in supplication. A moment later the Brother was swallowed up by trees, and nothing of the Tower or its outbuildings was visible to Quinn.

He came to the end of the irrigated land, and the trees be­came gradually more stunted and misshapen. The bleak brown countryside, that could support so little life, seemed a fitting place to die.

“Sister? Can you hear me, Sister? If someone did this to you, it's my fault. I disobeyed your orders. You told me not to try and contact O'Gorman, that it might do a lot of harm. Just find out where he is, you said, and report to you. I should have listened to you. I'm sorry. Please hear me, Sister. I'm sorry.”

Sorry.
The word echoed from the sheer walls of rock that lined parts of the road,
I'm sorry,
and the gray inert mass on the back seat stirred slightly. Quinn's eye caught the movement in the mirror.

“Why did you hire me to find a dead man, Sister?”

There was no response.

“When you ordered me not to contact him, you couldn't have known he was dead. Yet you must have guessed there was something peculiar going on that involved O'Gorman. Who could have told you except the murderer? And why after all these years did he decide to confess the crime in a letter? Was it because I asked you last week to give Martha O'Gorman a break, put an end to her uncertainty? . . . Was the letter of confession forced on the murderer by you? And why have you been trying to protect him?”

She let out a sudden cry of pain or protest.

“Did you believe he was penitent, Sister, and would never kill again?”

Another cry, more vehement than the first, like a child's wail of rage at an injustice. The rage was unmistakable, but Quinn wasn't sure whether it was directed at him for his questions, or at the killer for his betrayal, or at still a third person.

“Who killed O'Gorman, Sister?”

EIGHTEEN

Through the emergency
entrance of the San Felice hospital, Sister Blessing was carried on a stretcher. A young interne led Quinn into a waiting room hardly larger than a piano crate, and the questions began.

What was the name of the sick woman? Who was her closest relative? How old was she? Was she under treatment for any chronic disease or infection? What were the initial signs of her present illness? When had she last eaten, and what? Did she vomit? Was the vomitus discolored? Did it have an odor? Did she have difficulty speaking? Breathing? Had she passed any bloody urine or bloody stools? Was there rigidity of the muscles? Twitching? Face livid or flushed? Hands cold or warm? Was she delirious? Drowsy? Were the pupils of her eyes expanded or contracted? Were there burn marks around her mouth and chin?

“I'm sorry, I can't answer all those questions,” Quinn said. “I'm not a trained medical observer.”

“You did all right. Wait here, please.”

For almost half an hour he was left alone in the room. It was stifling hot and smelled of antiseptic and something sour, the sweat and fear of all the people who had waited in this room before him, and watched the door and prayed. The smell seemed to become stronger until he could taste it in the back of his throat.

He got up to open the door and almost collided on the threshold with a tall, thickset man. He looked like a rancher. He wore a broad-brimmed Stetson hat, a rumpled Western-style suit and, in place of a tie, a leather thong fastened with a large turquoise and silver clip. He had an air of wary cynicism about him, as if he'd spent too much time in places like emergency wards and no good had come out of any of them.

“Your name's Quinn?”

“Yes.”

“May I see your identification, please?”

Quinn took the papers out of his wallet. The man glanced at them briefly and without much interest, as though obeying a rule he had little use for.

“I'm Sheriff Lassiter.” He returned the papers. “You brought a woman in here about an hour ago?”

“Yes.”

“Friend of yours?”

“I met her ten or eleven days ago.”

“Where?”

“At the Tower of Heaven. It's a religious cult located in the mountains about fifty miles east of here.”

Lassiter's expression suggested that he had had dealings at the Tower, and not very pleasant ones. “How come you got mixed up with an outfit like that?”

“By mistake.”

“You haven't been living there?”

“No.”

“This is going to take all night if you just stand there saying yes and no. Can't you volunteer some information?”

“I don't know where to begin.”

“Begin somewhere, that's all I ask.”

“I drove to the Tower this morning from Chicote.” He went on to explain his meeting Mother Pureza on the road, and his subsequent discovery of the dead man. He described the construction of the inner court, the position of the body in relation to it and the circumstances of the death.

The sheriff listened, his only sign of interest a slight nar­rowing of the eyes. “Who was the man?”

“George Haywood. He owned a real estate business in Chicote.”

“He fell or was pushed from the top level, no way of know­ing which?”

“None that I could see.”

“This is a bad day for your friends, Mr. Quinn.”

“I saw Haywood only once before in my life, you could hardly call him a friend.”

“You saw him only once,” Lassiter repeated, “and yet you identified the body immediately, even though the face was battered in and covered with blood? You must have more highly developed eyesight than the rest of us.”

“I recognized his car.”

“By the license plates?”

“No.”

“The registration on the steering wheel?”

“No. By the make and model.”

“That's all?”

“Yes.”

“Now wait a minute, Mr. Quinn. You saw a car in the vicinity the same make and model as Haywood's and you immediately assumed it was his?”

“Yes.”

“Why? There are hundreds of identical cars on the roads.”

“Haywood left Chicote a few days ago under peculiar cir­cumstances,” Quinn said. “He told his mother and friends he was flying to Hawaii, but one of his associates checked the airlines and discovered his name wasn't on any of the flight lists.”

“That's still a pretty thin reason for jumping to the con­clusion that the dead man is Haywood. Unless, of course, you
expected
to find him at the Tower?”

“I didn't.”

“You didn't go there looking for him?”

“No.”

“His presence was a complete surprise to you?”

“It was a surprise.”

“Even in these parts very few people have ever heard of the Tower, let alone know its location. What would a real estate agent from Chicote be doing there?”

“He was dressed as a convert. He wore the regulation robe and his head was shaved.”

Lassiter assumed an expression of exaggerated concern. “You found this body in a strange place, wearing strange clothes, head shaved and face battered to a pulp, and you

identified it positively as belonging to a man you'd seen only once?”

“Not positively. But if you're a betting man, Sheriff, I'll give you odds.”

“Officially, I'm not a betting man. Unofficially, what odds?”

“Ten to one.”

“Those are very good odds,” Lassiter said, nodding gravely. “Very good indeed. Makes me kind of wonder what you base them on. Is it possible you haven't been entirely frank with me, Mr. Quinn?”

“I can't be entirely frank about Haywood. I know very little about him.”

Someone knocked on the door and Lassiter went out into the corridor for a minute. When he came back his face was flushed and beaded heavily with sweat.

He said, “There was an item in this afternoon's newspaper about a woman named Haywood. Did you see it?”

“No.”

“She escaped from Tecolote prison yesterday in a supply truck. Early this morning she was picked up wandering around the hills about fifteen miles north of Tecolote. She was suffer­ing from shock and exposure and could give no explanation of her actions. Are the two Haywoods related, by any chance?”

“They're brother and sister.”

“Now isn't that interesting. Maybe Miss Haywood was also a friend of yours?”

“I saw her once,” Quinn said wearily. “Which happens to be the same number of times I saw her brother, which doesn't make either of them exactly a pal of mine.”

“Have you any reason for believing the two Haywoods planned a rendezvous at the Tower?”

“No.”

“It seems a funny coincidence, though, doesn't it? Hay­wood disappears, and a couple of days later his sister tries to. Were they pretty chummy?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“You're a great disappointment to me, Mr. Quinn. I as­sumed that since you're a licensed detective you'd be brim­ming with information which you would naturally pass on to me. But I expect it's easier to get a license in Nevada than in California?”

“I wouldn't know.”

“Well, maybe you'll find out if you try to get one here,” Lassiter said. “Now about this woman you brought in, what's her connection with Haywood?”

“I have no idea.”

“I presume she has a name other than Sister Blessing of the Salvation?”

“Mrs. Featherstone. Mary Alice Featherstone.”

“Any close relatives that you know of?”

“A son living in or near Chicago. His name may be Charlie.”

“Is that another of your hunches, Mr. Quinn?”

“Not one I'd care to lay odds on.”

Lassiter went back to the door and addressed someone standing in the corridor outside: “Send Sam over here with the lab car, will you, Bill? And get in touch with the Chicago police, see if they can locate a man called Featherstone, first name possibly Charlie, and tell him his mother's dead. Some­body fed her enough arsenic to kill a horse.”

In spite of the heat in the room, Quinn had begun to shiver and his throat felt as though a hand had seized it.
She was a nurse,
he thought.
Perhaps she knew right away that she'd been poisoned and who had done it, yet she made no attempt to accuse anyone, or to save her own life by taking an antidote.

He remembered the first night he had talked to her. She had stood in front of the stove rubbing her hands together as if she felt the chill of death in the air: “
I am getting old . .. Some of the days are hard to face. My soul is at peace but my body rebels. It longs for some softness, some warmth, some sweet­ness. Mornings when I get out of bed my spirit feels a touch of heaven, but my feet—oh, the coldness of them, and the aches in my legs. Once in a Sears catalogue I saw a picture of a pair of slippers.... They were the most beautiful slippers I ever did see, but of course an indulgence of the flesh. . . .”

“Come on, Quinn,” Lassiter said. “You're about to take another trip to the Tower.”

“Why?”

“You seem to know your way around the place. You can act as our guide and interpreter.”

“I prefer not to.”

“I'm not offering you a preference. What's the matter, feeling a little nervous? Something on your mind?”

“A pair of fuzzy pink slippers.”

“Sorry, we're fresh out of fuzzy pink slippers. How about a nice cuddly Teddy bear instead?”

Quinn took a long deep breath. “ ‘Having trod the rough earth, my feet uncovered, I will walk the smooth and golden streets of heaven.' ... I'd like to see Sister Blessing, if I may.”

“You'll have plenty of time to see her later. She's not going anywhere.” Lassiter's mouth stretched in a mirthless smile. “You don't like that kind of talk, eh, Quinn? Well, here's my advice, learn to like it. In this business, if you start thinking too seriously about death, you end up cutting out paper dolls at the funny farm.”

“I'll take that chance, Sheriff.”

Quinn rode in the back seat with Lassiter while a deputy in uniform drove the car. A second car followed, containing two more deputies and portable lab equipment.

It was four o'clock and still very warm. As soon as they were outside the city limits Lassiter took off his hat and coat and unbuttoned his shirt collar.

“How well did you know this Sister Blessing, Quinn?”

“I talked to her a couple of times.”

“Then how come you got all choked up at her death?”

“I liked her very much. She was a fine, intelligent woman.”

“Somebody evidently didn't share your high opinion of her. Any idea who?”

Quinn looked out of the window, wishing there was a way he could tell the sheriff about O'Gorman's murder without bringing in the letter to Martha O'Gorman. He had promised Martha never to mention it to anyone, but he was beginning to realize that his promise might be impossible to keep.

“I have reason to believe,” he said carefully, “that Sister Blessing was acting as the friend and confidante of a murderer.”

“Someone inside the colony?”

“Yes.”

“A stupid and reckless position for a woman you describe as intelligent.”

“In order to understand the situation, you have to under­stand more about the colony itself. It operates as a unit almost entirely separated from the rest of the country. The True Believers, as they call themselves, do not feel bound to obey our laws or follow our customs. When a man enters the Tower he sheds his other life completely, his name, his family, his worldly goods, and, last but not least, his sins. Under our system it's illegal to harbor a murderer. But look at it from the viewpoint of the sect: the victim belonged to a world they no longer recognized, the crime is punishable under laws they don't believe in or consider valid. In her own eyes Sister Blessing was not acting as an accessory after the fact of murder. Neither were the others,
if
they knew about the murder, and that's a big if.”

“You're making a lot of excuses for her, Quinn.”

“She doesn't need my excuses,” Quinn said. “I'm only trying to help you realize that in a short time you'll be dealing with people whose attitudes are vastly different from your own. You're not going to change them, so you might as well under­stand them.”

“You sound like a member of the Peace Corps making a report on Cuckooland,”

“Cuckooland may not be quite as cuckoo as you think.”