The Violet Crow (6 page)

The next 10 inches of the article were about Magdalena, female sexuality, and children's literature, except for the concluding paragraph, which stated:

Bruno X claims that in addition to physical clues, a crime scene contains psychic clues as well. Strong emotions leave a residue that can be detected by those who know what to look for. Psychic evidence needs to be evaluated scientifically just like other forensic evidence and the Kabbalah is the “technology” that he uses.

Bruno X adds that he did not study at the Kabbalah Co-op in L.A. and he does not know Magdalena personally. Or Tiffany Pupik. We commend Chief Black for his prompt action in bringing in such well-qualified outside resources. The investigation is already moving again and we look forward to a speedy resolution.

The reaction to Peaches' article in the
Pest
was swift and fateful.

Fully 66.6% of the families enrolled in Gardenfield Friends called Master Quentin's office to ask him what he was planning to do about security.

Against his better judgment, Master Quentin called Chief Black and asked him what security resources might be available from the town, as he still preferred not to entertain the offer from NewGarden Biosciences.

Chief Black hadn't read the story when Master Quentin called. As soon he got off the phone, he read the article and then angrily called Bruno to demand a meeting.

While Chief Black was on the phone, he missed receiving an angry phone call from Rabbi Nachman, of Philadelphia's oldest Orthodox congregation, Temple Emmanuel. The Rabbi was upset about the mischaracterization of the Kabbalah and was frustrated because he couldn't get anyone to take his call at the
Pest
.

Finally, Icky called Alison. He thought she'd be amused by all the Magdalena references. Instead, Alison became even more worked up than she'd been the day before regarding her term paper. She slammed down the phone and called her professor, Nathaniel Littlejohn, to make an appointment later in the week.

Chapter 13

“Dat Peaches, she's some piece a woik,” said Bruno, squirming under Chief Black's angry glare.

“Yes, I know,” said the Chief, not willing to let him off the hook.

“She tracked me down, like a … like a …” Bruno couldn't think of an analogy.

“Like a scared rabbit?” the Chief suggested.

Bruno looked hurt. “Like a pickle in a barrel. She cornered me in my trailer. She defeated my security system. I was vulnerable. She threatened me. I had to think fast. It was the only way out.”

“So you fed her this story to get her out of your hair …”

“That's right,” said Bruno, thinking he was off the hook. “I fed her alla dis
bubbe-meise
—old wives' tales—about da blood libel. Actually that's not so bad, if I do say so myself. Pretty quick thinking. Anyway, she hears Kabbalah, right away she's thinking Magdalena. So we got pretty good exposure, right? She says we're on the right track.”

The Chief glowered.

“OK. That business about ‘casts doubt on police theory' wasn't so good. But I didn't write that. I didn't say it. The headline writer made it up. You know that's not what I think.”

Chief Black laid down the hammer. “I know you didn't write the article. But you knew that Peaches did. Yet all you cared about was the fact that you handled Peaches all right with your quick thinking and your
bouillabaisse
.”

Bruno opened his mouth to interrupt, but the Chief plowed ahead.

“You thought you did fine, but you forgot about everybody else. Most important, you forgot about me. Dealing with the press is a war, not a battle. It's never over.”

Bruno looked at his shoes. “What was I supposed to do?”

“Take one for the team. It's obvious. Peaches is going to write whatever she feels like writing. There's nothing you can do about it. Except call me. Right away. I needed to know what you told Peaches. Had I known, I would have been able to look at the paper first thing. And I wouldn't have been broadsided by a situation that I didn't even know existed. I was bombarded by phone calls; I was unprepared, and it made me look … like a
shlemiel
.”

That was an act of kindness on the part of the Chief, leaving an opening for the psychic. “I think you mean
shlimazl
, Chief. In this case, I'm the
shlemiel
, da no-goodnik dat causes da trouble, and you're da
shlimazl
, da one with egg on his face … I'm truly …”

—The Chief cut him off before he could say “sorry.” “Now you know what I expect. Now get your briefcase, we're going out.”

Chief Black drove past the Little League fields and pulled into the parking lot for Tano's Deli, right across from the liquor store on the east side of town.

Inside was a brightly lit room dominated by deli cases and glass-fronted refrigerators stocked with cold drinks. On the walls hung cloth patches with embroidered insignia from police departments all across the U.S. Tano's was crowded with people waiting for takeout orders. Behind the counter, two heavily muscled and tattooed men were busy preparing cheesesteaks and hoagies and joking with the customers.

“Yo! Chief. How's it hangin'?” boomed the larger of the two.

The Chief's arm shot up in a friendly salute. “Chris. Ray.”

“There's room for you in back,” said Chris. “You gonna stick around or you want it to go?”

“Two of the usual for here,” replied the Chief. “This is my friend Bruno …”

Chris got excited when he heard the name. “Bruno Sammartino! The world champion wrestler. The living legend.”

Ray looked up from chopping lettuce. He squinted at Bruno, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lip, but didn't say anything.

Bruno just grinned and let the Chief lead him through a dusty curtain to the back room. It was tiny, crammed full of supplies and barely enough space for an old kitchen table with a scarred Formica top and aluminum legs, and two matching chairs with turquoise plastic seats. On the walls hung an old movie poster showing the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and the Pirelli tire calendar from 1999 featuring a sepia-toned photo of a nude woman with an old-fashioned hairstyle.

“Chris' mom?” Bruno wisecracked.

“Don't let him hear you say that,” warned the Chief. “Talk to me.”

“The most unusual thing about this case,” Bruno began, “is the lack of emotion. The girl was attacked from the back. She didn't see it coming, but still I'd expect a sense of shock and fear—or something—at the moment of impact. Here, there's nothing. I've never experienced anything like it before.”

“Any theories?”

Bruno thought carefully before replying. “What if she's, you know, a vegetable? Brain damaged. Something like that. Family gets tired of taking care of her. Can't afford it. Ashamed to own up publicly. Frustrated. So they decide to … end it.”

“Then they dump her at the Quaker meeting house? Why? It's not exactly your anti-Quaker blood libel scenario.”

“Shows you can't believe everything you read in the papers,” Bruno said.

“Suppose this is just a normal family. They have no experience disposing of a dead body. They watch a bunch of TV and figure the ground must be frozen because of the snow. If they don't bury her deep enough, some animal will dig up the grave. If they put her in the river, she'll wash up.”

“So they use the meeting house, thinking it will confuse people … as it has. But they still need a way to get in. And they managed to do it without leaving clues. That takes a lot of skill.”

“Or access to the meeting house. What if Quentin had an illegitimate daughter? Because of his role at the school, he might have wanted to keep it secret.”

“That's what I'd call a tortured scenario,” the Chief observed. “To make it work you need an illegitimate kid who's seriously handicapped. A guiltily obsessive father who won't even put her in a nursing home. Otherwise, she would've been reported missing.”

Bruno picked up the thread. “Right. She'd have to be living at home somewhere. Probably with the mother, never going out. The only other person who'd know she existed would be her doctor.”

The Chief shook his head. “It doesn't add up. The motive for killing her is to get rid of the burden? I can't see Quentin doing that.”

“Maybe the mother did it, and Quentin's protecting her.”

The Chief grabbed his phone to make a call. “That's a lot of ‘ifs,' but right now it's all we've got. We'll check into it, but it'll take some time. There are a lot of doctors in the area.”

Bruno hesitated. “What I just told you: There's logic to it. But it doesn't feel right. It all comes back to the girl. Why didn't she feel anything? There are powerful emotions at work here. There must be. But I can't find any trace of them. It's hard to imagine anybody, let alone parents, who could do something like that—without emotion.”

“I know,” said the Chief. This was the same brick wall he'd been running into since the investigation began.

Just then Ray rambled in with a couple of enormous cheesesteak hoagies wrapped in white paper. The smell of fried onions filled the room. Ray placed them on the table without comment and went back to work, leaving the velour curtain partly open.

“Dig in,” said the Chief. Consuming a Tano's cheesesteak hoagie with everything on it requires both hands and considerable concentration to keep the contents of the sub from sliding out onto your lap. Both Bruno and the Chief worked in silence for about seven and a half minutes.

Then Bruno spoke. “I had this dream. About William Penn.”

“William Penn?”

“The statue of William Penn on top of city hall in Philly. It … he was walking around.”

“Things like that happen in dreams.” The Chief continued eating.

Then Icky and a couple of friends entered the shop. The Chief could see him joking with Chris and hear him laughing out of proportion to anything that might have been said.

“Do the numbers 50-3-2-60 mean anything to you?”

“Sounds like a basketball score. College. 53-60.”

“It's not basketball season. I was watching a volleyball game last night on TV.”

“And?” The Chief was still keeping an eye, and half his attention, on Icky.

“And I think it was four different numbers. 50-3-2-60, not 53 to 60. Usually the high number goes first.”

“True. True. Maybe it's the combination to a gym locker? Or a safe?”

“You know in Hebrew, the numbers are actually letters of the alphabet. So you can translate numbers into words and vice versa. I tried that, and it came out ‘SBGN.' That mean anything to you?”

“SBGN?” the Chief echoed dully. “I dunno. Sonny Boy Good Night?”

“I couldn't make anything of it either,” Bruno admitted. “Then I realized: There's more than one kind of Quaker …”

“There is? You mean like low church and high church, that sort of thing?”

“No. I was watching them play on TV last night.”

“Right, the Quakers. University of Pennsylvania. Big 5 basketball. Crosstown rivalries. Great stuff. You don't think basketball fans did this? I mean it's basketball, not soccer.”

“Well it was volleyball, but that's not the point. Are you paying attention?”

“Oh, right,” the Chief said. “I guess I am distracted. See that kid in there with the bright red hair?”

Bruno turned around discreetly.

“Just go ahead and stare at him. There's no secret. He knows that we know that he's the town's biggest drug problem.”

“OK.”

“Can you read his mind?”

“Just like this? In a room crowded with all these people? Too many distractions.”

“Go ahead. Give it a try anyway.”

Bruno shut his eyes and tried to concentrate. Within seconds he was shaking his head, as if trying to ward off a hungry mosquito. “
Feh
. That's one messed up kid in there.”

“What's he thinking?”

“I couldn't tell.”

“But you said something …”

“Yeah, it's
chazerai—
a big mess. But that's just a general impression. A sense.”

“Like an aura. Could you see his aura?”

“Not exactly. I don't do auras.”

“C'mon,” scoffed the Chief. “What'd you see?”

“Things don't look too good for that kid. I think he might be in big trouble.”

“That makes sense. He's a drug addict. Do you have anything more specific?”

“No.”

“Hmpf.” The Chief seemed to be sulking.

“Anyway, I want to go right away and track down my lead about the Quakers.”

“You call that a lead?”

“Most definitely.”

“And how are you planning to follow up?”

“I'm heading over to the campus. Do some research in the library and then just … check things out.”

“Check things out?”

“Yeah. Walk around. See what's going on over there.”

“Well you can't.”

“I can't? Why not?”

“We have an appointment. Tell you what I'll do, though. I'll have Harry—Sergeant Abraham—call the campus cops and do a sweep of the message boards. He's our best technology resource; maybe he'll come up with something for you. And I'm going to have Michelle—Officer Coxe—check the hospitals and clinics. I really think those are our best shots right now.”

The Chief started laughing.

“Wha's funny?” complained Bruno, failing to guess that Chief Black had already moved on to another topic.

“I don't know how I could have forgotten. This Rabbi called. Name's Nachman. Ever heard of him?”

“Not really. Name sounds familiar, but I can't place it.”

“If you knew him I don't think you'd forget. He's a bit flamboyant. Lit a fire under the Mayor. Asked a lot of weird questions about you. Wanted to know how old you are. Whether you're married. Where did you study? Whatdya think? Is he looking for a date?”