Charisma (10 page)

He pulled into one of the overflow spaces next to the west wall, cut the engine, and got out. Then he went back and locked up the car. Here was another source of irritation: this garage was one of the least safe places to park your car in the city of New Haven. A Jaguar would have better luck propped against the curb on Congress Avenue. The gate was guarded twenty-four hours a day. There were always a dozen police officers on the premises, going in and out from one thing to another. It didn’t matter.
They
always got in here, and
they
always did significant damage.

Them.

Once, when he was eight years old, his mother told him a story about
them.
Her
them
in those days was different from his
them
now—her brain nattered away at her about Protestants; his was an equal opportunity employer—but the two
thems
had a great deal in common. They were Other and they were Bad. He was in the kitchen, eating toast, feeling sick, home with a cold. He never knew what had started his mother talking.

She got the toast out of the broiler, laying a layer of margarine across each piece as thick as the apron under a Christmas tree. She put that down in front of him and took a seat on the other side of the table.

“Do you know anything about Protestants?” she said.

He knew something about Protestants. He’d heard all about them, at school. He was in the third grade at Precious Blood Parochial School.

“Protestants are traitors to the true Church,” he told her dutifully, and she smiled.

“It’s not their treachery to the Church I’m worried about. Do you know what they used to do in this country, back when your grandmother was a little girl?”

“I guess they used to do a lot of things,” he said.

“When your grandmother was a little girl, I’m talking about Grandma Reilly now, my mother, when she was a little girl there were no parish schools in New Haven. There were only public schools. There was a law then, just like now, that everybody had to go to school somewhere. Since there weren’t any parish schools, Catholics went to public schools with everyone else.”

“Did they lose their faith?” Sister Catherine had told them about people who lost their faith. She’d described the tortures of Hell in detail.

“Some of them did,” his mother said. “Most of them didn’t. There were Sunday schools even then. The children were brought up right and everyone said family rosary. The problem was that the Bible was taught in the public schools, but it wasn’t the real Bible. It was the Protestant Bible with things left out and other things changed around. One of the things the Protestants changed around when they wrote their Bible was the Lord’s Prayer. They added something to it.”

“I know about that,” he said. “Sister Catherine told us. For thine is…”

“Shh,” his mother said. “Listen. They taught this Protestant Lord’s Prayer in the public schools, and every morning they made the children stand up and say it. They still do. It’s a terrible thing. There are Protestants in the public schools, but there are other people, too. Not only Catholics, but Jews, and it’s against the religion of the Jews to say the Lord’s Prayer at all. But they make all the children stand up and say it anyway.

“Your Grandma Reilly said this Lord’s Prayer in school for a whole year, for the first grade. Then that summer she started catechism with the nuns to prepare for First Communion. The nuns told her about the real Lord’s Prayer and the Protestant one, and why saying the Protestant one was wrong. Of course, everybody said the Protestant one in school anyway, just not to cause trouble, but your Grandma Reilly wasn’t like that. She thought if it was wrong she shouldn’t do it.

“When school started the next year she went to her class, but when the teacher stood up to lead the prayer your Grandma Reilly only said part of it. She left the part the Protestants had put in off. She did this for two weeks before the teacher noticed. Then he did. When the prayer was over he made the whole class stay standing and went down to her desk and asked her why she hadn’t said the whole prayer. And she told him.”

“Did she shake her cane at him?”

“She didn’t have a cane then. She was only a little girl. A very little girl. The teacher looked at her and said they were going to say the prayer again, and this time she had to say the whole thing. He went back to the front of the room and made them pray all over again. But when it came to the Protestant part, your Grandma Reilly still left it off.

“I think the teacher must have gone a little crazy. He made the class pray and pray and pray, again and again and again. It went on for hours. No matter what he did, he couldn’t make your grandmother say what she didn’t want to say. The teacher was very angry. Finally he took his pointer and stood right next to her desk, stood right over her to frighten her. Still, when the time came for the Protestant part, she put her hands flat down on her desk and didn’t say anything. That was when he lost control of himself. He lifted the pointer up over his head and brought it down on Grandma Reilly’s hand, brought it down hard, so that it broke her fingers.”

“
All
of her fingers?” Pat said. He was appalled. The nuns would whack away with their rulers now and again, but they never hit hard enough to break anything. They just made your fingers sting and your heart burn. Somehow, getting a nun angry at you was a shameful thing. Especially if she was little and old.

“I don’t know how many of her fingers he broke,” his mother said, “but it was more than one, and it was on more than one hand. She had to go to the hospital and have the bones set and the hands bandaged up. While she was there, the principal called her father and asked him to come into the school. Her father thought the principal was going to apologize, or maybe even fire the teacher who had broken Grandma Reilly’s fingers. It would only have made sense.

“But when your Grandma Reilly’s father got to the school, he found the principal very angry. ‘You Catholics,’ the principal said, ‘you’re going to have to decide what you want. You’re just going to have to decide if you want to be Americans.’

“Grandma Reilly’s father didn’t know what the principal was talking about. He was an American. He’d been born right here in New Haven in a house on Clark Street. But the principal said, ‘No man can be Catholic and American both. Americans don’t go in for superstitions and sell their souls to a pope. Americans don’t grovel around on their knees in front of a priest who’s a man no better than he should be.’

“Your Grandma Reilly’s father was a very pious man. He said, ‘But what about God?’ And the principal said, ‘Oh, God. God is the God of the powerful. Look around you and see who he loves best.’ ”

Pat looked down at his toast, half eaten, and his tea, half drunk. His head was spinning. He was only eight years old and he was sick enough to be confused on general principles. Half of what his mother had said he hadn’t understood. The other half had given him the first real shock of his life.

“I don’t understand,” he said again.

She nodded at him. “You don’t have to understand it all. You just have to understand this. There’s a difference between them and us. Our God is the God of the poor and the meek. Their God is the God of the powerful. You can see who He loves best.”

“I don’t understand,” he insisted.

She got up. “Don’t understand then. Just remember. There’s a difference between them and us.”

Them and us. Ever since, his world had been divided into them and us.

The elevator had bounced down in front of him and opened its doors. Since he was leaning on the button, it was staying where it was. Its inner walls were covered with spray paint and scratch marks:
FUCK THE PIGS; UP WITH ASSHOLES; LUIS 86.

He looked around to make sure there was no one watching him and stepped inside the elevator. He punched the button for the eighth floor and leaned against the handrail while the cage took him up. The people who worked in this building always called the cab the cage even though it wasn’t one. The damn thing shook as violently as the pen of a mistreated tiger in a third-rate traveling zoo.

On the eighth floor, he got out, shrugged off his jacket, and folded it over his arm. He had been subject to more and more of these reveries lately, these daydreams, these walking trance-states into the past. Certain things, like the deaths of Theresa Cavello and Billy Hare, just seemed to set them off. Part of his mind told him that was reasonable. You had to process the things you couldn’t stomach as well as the things you could. Your body got rid of waste one way and your mind had to get rid of it in another.

Unfortunately the rest of his mind wasn’t so reasonable. It was as irritated with him as he was with the building, which made for the beginning of a very bad day.

On his desk was the file marked “McVann, Margaret Mary.” It was a crime he hadn’t been called to the scene of, and not one he’d expected to be involved in, but a passing memory of the details had made him leave a message with his secretary to have the file brought up. Now he sat down and flipped through it, to the picture of Margaret Mary with the Eucharistic symbol on her forehead, to the notation in grease pencil in the photograph’s corner: “temp in apt at disc 4°F.” The rest of the photographs detailed bruising—on the neck, on the back of the hands.

The Eucharistic symbol made Margaret Mary McVann and Theresa Cavello connected.

How?

The bruises on Margaret Mary and the lack of them on Theresa made the two cases different.

Why?

Did he have a nut here or something more banal, a mugger with a sense of humor, an individual with a grudge?

It was the kind of thing he would never be absolutely sure of until the cases were closed.

I
F PAT MALLORY HADN’T
known the people at Damien House, he would never have become involved in the Theresa Cavello case. It wasn’t the kind of thing he was supposed to get involved in. Chief of Homicide was essentially an administrative position. His job was to “stay on top” of duty rosters and case assignments and ongoing investigations. What this meant was that he was supposed to have answers to the idiotic questions Dan Murphy or the mayor decided to ask at irregular intervals: why had this been done here, why hadn’t that been done there, why couldn’t his people come up with a single viable suspect in this other place. Since the answers were always the same, but nobody wanted to hear them, he spent a lot of his time inventing euphemisms. It was amazing what the single word
crack
could be turned into, when he put his mind to it.

Every once in a while, for things like the Billy Hare case, he was dragged out for show. Years ago, he’d had a reputation as a first-class detective. He was the man who’d solved the Jug Killer case and managed to get the Church Street Slasher safely into jail. His name appeared in the
Register
and his picture appeared on the local television news. That was how he’d ended up in this office, even though he didn’t play politics—even though he didn’t know how. Crack had brought with it a crime wave that made all previous crime waves seem unreal. Compared to a machine-gun drug battle in broad daylight on a street four blocks from the New Haven Green, the Church Street Slasher was Saturday afternoon at the movies. In the wake of the bad publicity, the mayor had thought it would be a good idea to promote him. He was known to the public, and he wasn’t a party favorite of the other side.

Now he sat down on his desk and looked at the mess on it—the mess of a Tuesday morning when he’d been late getting in to work. In the upper-left-hand corner were two stacks of pink message slips. The taller stack would be messages he didn’t have to answer: civilians with bees in their bonnets; social workers with Good Liberal speeches to deliver about Bad Reactionary police officers; magazine writers with questions about his childhood that sounded like they’d been cribbed from a textbook for Abnormal Psych III. The shorter stack would be messages he did have to answer. Some of them would be just as irrelevant as the messages in the taller stack, like the ones from Dan Murphy demanding to know what he was
doing
up here. Others would be serious news. He had fifty-four detectives under his authority. All of them were working.

He reached for the shorter message stack and then stopped. He was not a man who resented riding a desk, or got irritated by the constraints of it. He thought it was a nice way to go on working without getting shot. Not getting shot was just fine with him. He’d been shot a couple of times, and shot at a couple of dozen more. He hadn’t liked any of it at all. Still, there were times he got tired of the bureaucratic pace of it. This was one of them. The shorter stack would be full of information about the progress of the Billy Hare case. It would say what he expected it to say, which would depress him beyond reason. He didn’t care how many front-page stories they printed in the
Register.
He’d seen cases like this before. They were unsolvable, but they were impossible to process. The chances that he’d ever have what he needed to arrest somebody were practically nil.

Although he wished they weren’t.

He really wished they weren’t.

The upper-left-hand corner of his desk contained one file folder, marked
CAVELLO/DAMIEN HOUSE
in royal blue Flair across its broad front flat. It was marked with ordinary police code on its tab, but he didn’t pay any attention to that. He pulled it to him and opened it. There were witness statements. There were reports from the two patrolmen first on the scene. There were photographs. There was even a computer printout nearly an inch thick, containing the raw data the Mobile Crime Unit had collected to write its reports with. What there wasn’t was a report from the morgue.

Pat closed the file and tapped his hands against it, distracted. Then he punched his intercom and said, “Andrea? Are you there?”

“My God,” Andrea said. “You’re in. I didn’t see you come in. When did you come in?”

“About a minute ago. You must have been in the john.”

“I don’t go to the john. I was just about to bring in more messages.”