Burning Midnight (27 page)

With a cold egg sandwich floating comfortably in coffee I drove down to Corktown and found a space in front of the square house where the sister lived. The
ROOMS FOR RENT
signs were still in place, a little more curled at the edges. The same automobiles I'd seen before were parked in the same places, snow piled around their tires; they would move the first of every month when the unemployment checks needed cashing. I walked around a slight dark-skinned girl of about ten seated on the porch steps, preoccupied with the text she was sending, and waited for the hefty landlady to let me in. The next generation will come with thumbs the size of cucumbers. The sun glimmered the color of skim milk behind a layer of clouds as thin as waxed paper and my breath smoked around my ears. It was going to be mufflers with the Easter bonnets again this year.

I found Delia sitting cross-legged on the patterned rug in her room, her bandaged arms rubber-gauntleted to the elbows, sorting Rorschach-shaped scraps of charred paper into piles on a sheet of butcher paper. The gloves were stained black and there were black smears on her sweatshirt and jeans and the tip of her nose. The unprocessed scraps filled a macramé bag on the floor at her elbow.

“Pull up a chair,” she said. “Arson let me forage. If I can restore twenty percent of what I lost from my files, I should qualify for a master's in archaeology.”

“That ought to go well with the science degree.”

“The girls must love you. You remember everything.”

“Some of it comes to me in dreams. Usually when it's too late.”
Such beautiful promise. Such profanity.
Why don't Latins rule the world? I sat in the rocking chair. “Been following the news?”

“One more lead story from Mexicantown and they'll have to broadcast it in two languages. The police have Luís Guerrera in custody and a Zapatista named Molina in a drawer in the county morgue.”

The TV and radio reports had linked Molina to the murders in the rooster factory—part of a power play, the cops said, to fill the vacuum left by Emiliano Zorborón's untimely death; Roscoe Berdoo and Django would have made inconvenient witnesses. Old Country Zaps were suspected. The cops were silent on whether Molina had given them any information before he died.
El Hermano,
they said, was being held as a person of interest in the death of Domingo “Seventh Sunday” Siete. The police refused to comment on whether there was any connection suspected with Zorborón's murder and the firebombing of Sister Delia's house of charity.

“How are your hands?”

She held them up in front of her face as if she'd forgotten about them until that moment. “They itch like crazy. That means they're healing. My doctor wouldn't approve of what I'm doing with them, but the sooner I can get my operation back on its feet the better. As things stand it will take months to retrieve what the neighborhood lost this past week. Years, more likely; probably as many as it took to start changing people's minds about what Mexican-Americans are all about. All we needed was murder, arson, and cockfighting to put us right back under that sombrero at the base of a cactus.”

“‘Us'?”

She looked up with a smile full of rue. “It went up with the building, but I had a framed certificate from the Mexicantown International Welcome Center naming me an honorary Chicana. Nothing's meant more to me since I took my vows.”

“How come?”

“That's an insensitive question.”

“So give me a sensitive answer.”

“They're a proud people with a rich heritage. They don't let just anyone in.”

I said, “They don't need you.”

“What?” She sat on her heels, bracing her sooty gloved hands on her thighs.

“Suppose, single-handedly, you turn Mexicantown into the garden center of the Midwest. People will say the locals couldn't have done it without a good old Anglo-Saxon at the wheel. Suppose you fail. They'll say, well, how much could anyone do with such a shiftless people? They've had plenty of that without your help. They don't need you.”

“What are you saying?”

“I just said it.”

“I should give up.”

“That'd be a waste of talent. The world's full of causes in need of a leader. I'm saying you should turn this one over to the people you say you want to help.”

“And what if they fail?”

“They fail.”

“Just let them drown.”

“Or let them learn to swim.”

“Pull themselves up by their bootstraps? And where will the boots come from?”

“They're no good if they're borrowed.”

“I'm glad to say not everyone is as cynical as you.”

“I didn't say they
would
fail. They should have the chance to, all on their own. Or to succeed the same way. It's the only kind of success that counts.”

“Who are you, Horatio Alger?”

“The trouble with you earnest types is you get so caught up in the cause you forget you're not alone. You think you're the only one who can save the situation. Little by little, you start to feel contempt for the people you're trying to help. When that happens, the consequences of your actions don't matter. Just the actions.”

“Not Horatio Alger. Ayn Rand, maybe; but I don't think of you as having a political opinion of any kind.”

I wasn't sure who that was, so I let it slide. “That was a lucky break, getting up to go for supplies just when that Molotov cocktail came through the window.”

“The Lord looks after me.” She returned to her sorting. “A lot of people in the Order thought I turned my back on Him when I left the Church. I never did; and as it turned out, He didn't turn His back on me either.”

“He gave up on Siete in the end.”

“Domingo had his chances. We all get plenty, but the well has a bottom.”

“The Church says it's never too late.”

“That's where we broke. You can't just coast along counting on a deathbed confession to save you in the end.”

“That go for Zorborón too?”

“He found the bottom before I came along.”

I watched her play her game of solitaire. My legs would long since have gone to sleep in that position, but she'd never had a bullet in one.

I said, “It's a wonder you waited as long as you did.”

She turned over three more scraps of half-incinerated paper, rejected one as unreclaimable, and stacked the others before looking up. “Waited?”

I shifted gears again. “I looked up your school transcripts.”

“I could've saved you the trouble. All you had to do was ask. I didn't make the dean's list.”

“You didn't have to. You mentioned you'd studied science at the University of Detroit before you decided to become a nun. The people in charge of Records wouldn't give me the time of day, but a party whose name I wouldn't mention in interrogation is longer on talent than discretion. Chemistry was your interest, two semesters. According to Ray Charla, anyone with rudimentary chemistry training could have mixed up enough cyclostyrene to blow up the City-County Building.”

“Someone blew it up? I guess the doings in the neighborhood shoved that one right off the front page.”

“Now you're just vamping. Not like you.”

She arranged what she'd stacked into a jigsaw puzzle. Her concentration seemed to have deepened.

“It was that second bottle did you in,” I said.

She gave up then, pushed the papers away from her, and sat back once again on her heels. “It's been a generation since catechism, and you're no good at making up riddles anyway. Your mind's too direct.”

“So is a turtle's. He gets there eventually.”

“Does the same go for this conversation?”

“Charla found what was left of two bottles close together in the rubble in your office. Someone filled one with super-accelerant, the other with common drain cleaner and aluminum foil. MacGyver would've been proud.”

She scratched the side of her jaw, leaving another streak of black. “You don't have to spend much time at street level in this town to know aluminum foil and drain cleaner makes a dandy low-grade bomb. You sure don't need a knowledge of the table of elements.”

“You also don't need to risk throwing an explosive device through a window and maybe being seen. Anyone could figure how far to fill the drain-cleaner bottle to leave enough air for the bomb to go off on delayed-action. Then all he'd have to do is tape it to a bottle of gasoline or charcoal lighter fluid—or cyclostyrene—plant it near enough to a window from the inside to make it look as if it had been thrown through the glass, and make arrangements to be out of range when it went off. The blast would blow out the window, and with all the ash and debris lying around afterward, it'd be almost impossible for even an arson expert to say whether the window shattered from outside or inside. There'd be plenty of glass fragments on both sides and not enough difference to make a case against the so-called victim.

“You were the only witness to the bombing,” I said. “No one else saw or heard anything until the fire broke out. The entire police theory was built on what you gave them.”

She was a rock under pressure; but then I said before it takes a strong constitution to live in a world of confessions and still maintain equilibrium. “The witness lied. Pretty theory. Too bad it depends on the person who set the bomb coming away unscathed.” She held up her hands, bandaged under the rubber gloves.

“Minor burns. Even the EMS attendants didn't put up much of an argument when you bailed out of the stretcher. Just how much air to leave in the bottle depends on variables like humidity and temperature, which this time of year is a crapshoot. You timed your run well enough to avoid serious incineration, but you were a half-second off to keep from getting a piece of it. My thought? It blew up just after you finished planting it, when your hands were still inside the edge of the blast. That turned out okay for you, because it went a little more toward eliminating you as a suspect. A crime-scene purist might question the splash pattern; but who around here would consider Sister Delia a suspect, knowing her dedication to the citizens of Mexicantown?”

“So I'm a fraud. What's my end? Munchausen by proxy? Set myself up as a hero so I can warm myself in the glow of public adoration?”

“Not you. The dedication's real. You applied yourself to the task of ridding the neighborhood of its bad element. It's why you made yourself out a gang target, so it looked like the bad element wanted to knock the mortar out from under the cornerstones. First you sacrificed the paint job on your car, posing as a victim. Penny-ante stuff, not meant to draw much attention at the time—wouldn't do to spark an official investigation too soon—but torching your office nailed it tight, and right on schedule. After that, no one in the world would suspect you of killing Zorborón.”

She laughed; I wish she hadn't. It had the shrill edge of hysteria, like rats fighting between walls. “How'd I do that? I forget.”

“A garage is a noisy, public place, people coming in and going out through the bay doors without the employees taking much notice because of the traffic volume. You wouldn't have needed much of a disguise—a cold spring makes anyone in a stocking cap and a bulky coat invisible—maybe you didn't bother. You can get too clever with that kind of thing and draw more attention to yourself.

“Anyway, no one paid much attention when you let yourself into
El Tigre
's office and shot him between the eyes. That doesn't take much skill at close range, especially when he wouldn't be expecting Sister Delia to give him anything but a good tongue-lashing, and he was used to that. He trained as a boxer, so his reflexes were better than average, even allowing for middle-age slowdown. And he was a cautious man by virtue of his profession. But the worst he had to fear from you was a picket line, he thought. And so he was sitting comfortably behind his desk when you put a bullet in his brain.

“The noise was no problem,” I said, “not with one of the Tijuana twins banging the bejesus out of a hunk of metal on the workbench and the other using an air wrench. I never got a good look at that gun you showed me. Not a big caliber, I'm guessing. You bought it for your personal protection, not to hunt elk.”

She stopped laughing as if a breaker had been tripped. She was still kneeling with her weight on her heels and her hands on her thighs, as if she'd been interrupted in the middle of planting petunias. She dusted off her rubber-encased palms and let one drop inside the macramé bag, rustling among the charred papers inside. She put all her attention to it as if the next piece she excavated would unlock the key to her whole filing system. “Proof?”

I stroked the arms of my chair, watching the movement inside the bag. “Ray Charla found the tool you used to scratch those naughty words and pictures on your car. The paint chips should be easy to match.”

Her hand stopped groping.

“You overdid it with Siete,” I went on. “In six months, maybe less, he'd be no one's headache but the coroner's. But you thought you needed a fall guy—two, counting Luís Guerrera, the obvious choice based on gang ambition—and it took two more obstacles out of the way between Mexicantown as it is and the one you had in mind. Did you help him along with that shot of black tar heroin, or did he provide it himself? It won't matter to the judge or jury, but it's a hobby of mine to tie off all the broken blood vessels.”

“I suppose someone's recording all this.”

I shook my head. I kept my eyes on her bag. “I'm allergic to adhesive tape. Anyway, the cops have all the evidence they need. The Molotov cocktail with a time delay—you're well-known here, if you bought the ingredients locally, some clerk will remember—the paint scraps to lay the deal off on the young werewolves; I don't know if the cops will ever be able to tie you to Zorborón tight enough to make a case, but those forensics types are clever. They can match one exploded bomb to another well enough to say it was the same party both times. The rest is courtroom pyrotechnics.”