Charisma (23 page)

“Splinters,” he said, pointing down.

She smiled. “I’m not worried about splinters. I’ve been trying not to scratch these floors any more than they’ve been scratched. They’re made of what’s really beautiful old wood.”

“I don’t think anybody has the time to notice.”

“Maybe not. You’re Patrick Mallory, aren’t you? I met you here a couple of weeks ago. I’m Susan Murphy.”

“I remember.”

“You remember because of my brother Dan. Father Tom isn’t here, you know. I’m not sure where I’m supposed to put you.”

They both looked from side to side, then up and down. Living room, door to kitchen. Stairs and floor. Crucifix and mirror. The whole house was lit up, but this part of it was oddly empty. Pat could hear sounds coming from the back, where the kitchen and the two small bathrooms were. He thought there were also bathrooms upstairs, but he wasn’t sure.

“Well,” he said. “I suppose we should go to the kitchen. I could use a cup of coffee. I could use a few people to talk to, too.”

Susan looked toward the kitchen and bit her lip. “A lot of people don’t know she’s gone yet. I mean, they know she’s not around. They can see that. But they don’t know she’s gone. Father Tom felt, with all the murders, people would jump to conclusions.”

“They’re probably jumping to conclusions anyway.”

“Maybe. But some of the kids are only six or seven years old. I know they’ve seen a lot, but still—”

“How come
you
know?” he asked her. “You can’t have been around long enough to make it into Father Tom’s inner circle.”

She had been looking everywhere but at him—deliberately, Pat thought—and now she took a pack of cigarettes out of her jeans and bent her head over her preparations to smoke. She had her blue Bic lighter turned up too high. The flame shot out of it, a long stream of fire in the air, nearly singeing her nose. She got the cigarette lit anyway, dragged on it, and blew out a stream of smoke. Pat Mallory found himself wondering why so many of the ex-nuns he knew got addicted to nicotine.

“The thing is,” Susan Murphy said, “I had to know. I mean, I was sharing a room with her last night.”

“Upstairs?”

“That’s right. It was a kind of test, I think. I’m never sure what Father Tom is up to. I was here yesterday morning.”

“All right.”

“I don’t know why I came, yesterday morning, I mean. I was just here. Then I went home for lunch, and Dan was there—my brother is—”

“I know who your brother is, Miss Murphy. I think we went through this the last time.”

“Yes. Anyway, the news came over the radio about the investigation of Father Burne, and I came back.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. I think I got a little crazy and refused to leave.”

“You think?”

Another drag. Another stream of smoke. Blue eyes and black hair. “Do you know they have mini-retreats here, the way we used to give in the convent schools? Four or five hours of praying and edification and then a night under discipline of silence. I used to think that was strange even in the old days.”

“You did that here, last night?”

Inhale, exhale, tap ash. “I remember wondering if it had been Marietta’s idea. If she wanted a little peace and quiet for once. They’ve—we’ve—got fourteen girls up there. Most of the time it’s probably like a nonstop pajama party.”

“Did Marietta leave before the silence started, or after?”

“Before. We were just starting a rosary. She left that for me to do. She didn’t really trust me to do much of anything else.”

“So she came downstairs while the girls were saying a rosary. She didn’t come back up again.”

Susan Murphy shook her head. “No, she didn’t. I suppose I should have raised the alarm—I’ve been kicking myself all morning for not raising the alarm—but I didn’t think anything of it. Last night at dinner, Father Tom was saying how when a kid came to the door, whoever let him in was supposed to stop everything to take care of him. Everything. You weren’t even supposed to go to the bathroom. I just thought—”

“A kid had come to the door.” Pat Mallory nodded. For all he knew, a kid had come to the door. He had been working in New Haven too long to believe in the innocence of street children.

The smoke from Susan Murphy’s cigarette was curling up through her great mass of hair, creating a fog that he didn’t find unpleasant. Usually, some atavistic part of him rebelled at the sight of women who smoked. For some reason, he actually liked it on her. He just wished she would relax, instead of twitching and looking away. He was in and out of Damien House all the time. Half the police force was, because Damien House was the best place to bring the kids they found sleeping on the Green and under the stairways of abandoned buildings all winter long. He wasn’t used to having to be nervous here.

“Look,” he said, “there must be someone around who knows something, someone I could talk to. I can’t do anything to help unless I get more information.”

“Father Burne—”

“Father Burne went to see the auxiliary bishop,” he said patiently. “He told me he was going to on the phone. Under the circumstances, that could take hours.”

“I know,” Susan said, “but—”

“Look,” Pat said again, “what about Francesca? Francesca’s usually around somewhere—”

“I know where Francesca is,” Susan said. She looked around the foyer, as if she expected the older woman to materialize, and then seemed to make up her mind about something. “You go into the living room,” she told Pat. “I’ll get her and send her out to you. As long as I don’t bring you into the kitchen, no one can accuse me of not thinking about the children. That’s where most of them are this hour of the morning.”

“But—”

She shook her head at him and walked away, moving like a nun.

“The problem,” Francesca said, after she had scooped him out of the living room, deposited him at the kitchen table in spite of Susan’s Father Tom-inspired worries about traumatizing the children, and handed him a cup of coffee, “is that there’s just so many places we can search. I don’t mean there’s just so many places she could be. You could hide a townful of bodies out there in those vacant lots. But searching—”

“It wouldn’t make much sense to find Marietta just to get yourself killed.”

“Mugged, anyway,” Francesca said. “According to the kids, some new drug hit the street about four days ago. I didn’t need them to tell me. There’s been a rash of robberies from one end of the Congo to the other and we had our Virgin stolen again. I hate it when our Virgin gets stolen. The lady who gives them to us gets absolutely infuriated, and she always takes it out on Father Tom.”

As far as Pat Mallory was concerned, everybody took everything out on Father Tom, as a matter of principle. He thought about Dan Murphy’s investigation and flushed.

“Tell me what happened last night,” he said, “as far as you can figure. Tell me about Susan Murphy.”

Francesca’s eyes went to the door. Susan had gone out to dump some trash. He and Francesca seemed to be the only people who noticed her absence. The kitchen was full of kids eating breakfast standing up, but they not only had no time for Susan Murphy, they had no time for Francesca and Pat.

Francesca poured herself half a cup of coffee, and filled the other half with nondairy creamer. “Oh, Susan,” she said. “Well, she’s here. She showed up yesterday afternoon—”

“I thought it was morning.”

“I heard something about morning. Don’t ask me that. You know how I am about mornings. All I know for sure is, she showed up yesterday afternoon, right after the news came out, and she was very upset. Whether it was real or fake, I couldn’t tell you.”

“What did it look like?”

“Real. But Father Tom thought it was fake.”

“Why?”

“Well, she’s Dan Murphy’s sister, isn’t she? And let me tell you, whatever that man is doing, it’s stranger than it looks on the surface. I know what child sexual abuse cases look like, Pat, I was a social worker. This is—”

“What?”

Francesca shrugged. “Father Tom says it’s because the boy is so much older than accusers usually are in these cases. Did you know Dan’s office had a boy?”

“No, I didn’t,” Pat said. He turned it over in his head a few times. It didn’t make sense. “How could he have? Do you mean one of the boys from Damien House walked over to Dan Murphy’s office, or some police station—”

“No, that’s exactly what I don’t mean. Do you remember what happened to Bruce Ritter?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Everybody does, I suppose. Well, if you ask me, what’s fishy about all of this is that it’s happening in exactly the same way. This boy is grown now, or nearly. Theoretically—and notice I said theoretically—he went to Dan and said that, I don’t know, years ago, Father Tom molested him. Then his mother showed up in John Kelly’s office and said it was all a crock—just like with that boy who accused Bruce Ritter and his own father said he was an habitual liar.”

“Maybe the kid read the reports in the papers on the Ritter case. Maybe he thought that’s the way things were supposed to be done.”

“Crap,” Francesca said. “That’s utter trash and you know it. Most of these kids can barely read, and that one—I remember that one. I’ve been here forever. What most of us think around here is,
Dan
read the newspaper reports on the Ritter case, and Dan set it up.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” Francesca’s coffee cup was empty again. This time, so was the thermos she had brought to the table. Pat watched her get up and walk to the counter where another pot was brewing, pour her cup half full, fill the thermos. She was moving slowly and painfully, showing her age for the first time Pat could remember.

“I can’t help feeling it’s all connected,” she said, coming to sit down again. She filled the rest of her cup with nondairy creamer again and stirred. “Not just Dan and this boy who’s accusing Tom, but these women who are being murdered and then these boys—”

“Francesca, where do you get your information?”

“About the boys I get it from the papers, same as everybody else,” she said. “About Dan Murphy—let’s just say there’s someone in that office with a
very
close connection to Damien House.”

Pat Mallory sighed. “I thought there might be. But it’s not a very safe thing to do, Francesca. There isn’t a cop in this city who trusts Dan Murphy as far as he can throw him. There’s no reason to trust him.”

“We don’t trust him. Why do you think we spy?”

“It would be better to leave him alone.”

“Why? He won’t leave us alone. He’s out to shut this place down for reasons that are beyond my power to comprehend.”

“Francesca—”

“Never mind,” Francesca said. “You came here to talk about Marietta, not the Machiavellian machinations of Dan Murphy. I should take you outside and show you how it went.”

She did take him outside, but not, as Pat had suspected, to show him how it went. There was no “how it went.” The small square yard at the back of Damien House was clean and empty. There was not only no body, but nowhere to hide one. Somebody had already emptied the garbage cans and taken the garbage away. Since trash removal service was nonexistent on Amora Street, that meant someone had stuffed the back of a car full of plastic bags and hauled them out to the nearest public dump, somewhere in the suburbs. Pat thought it was a good thing most public dumps had no system for identifying the people legally allowed to use them. If they had, the garbage would have been piling up around Damien House for years, until it ate the building whole.

“I wonder where Susan went,” Francesca said as they came outside. The garbage cans were bright silver and clean, in need of being stuffed with plastic bags. “Timmy’s already gone to the dump. She didn’t come back inside.”

“Maybe she went to the dump with Timmy.”

“There’s never any room in the car for anything but Timmy and the trash.” Francesca walked over to the garbage cans, looked deeply into one, and shook her head. “That’s the first thing we thought, you know, when Marietta wasn’t in the kitchen this morning. That she’d come out here to dump some trash—there’s always so much trash—anyway, that she’d come out and then had a heart attack or collapsed. She’s really not well, you know. Then we looked out here, of course, and she wasn’t anywhere in sight, and then Susan came down and said that Marietta hadn’t been in bed all night, and then—”

“Did you see her last night?” Pat asked. “Did you talk to her?”

“Just to say hello. She was coming downstairs for her milk and her pills.”

“You didn’t see her go outside?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Did anyone? Father Tom?”

“He said he didn’t,” Francesca said. “Pat, if you think she might be somewhere in the house, don’t. We looked.”

“Hard?”

“Very hard.”

“Including in the basement? And the attic?”

“We have a cellar, not a basement. We don’t have an attic at all. That’s the infants’ dorm now. And yes, we looked.”

“What about the doorbell?” Pat asked. “You’re up most of the night, aren’t you? Did you hear the doorbell ring?”

“No, I didn’t. And I would have heard. Those ringers are right outside my door. I’m the emergency squad of last resort around here.”

“Mmmph,” Pat said. He looked at the garbage cans again, at the ground, at the low wall that blocked Damien House off from the vacant lot behind it. The wall was new, built by a couple of volunteers after a rash of robberies a few years ago, totally ineffective. From where he stood, he could see piles of cardboard cartons shivering in the wind. They were probably full of junkies freezing to death.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I want to come down here and torch the whole Congo.”

“If you do, you’ll torch us with it,” Francesca told him.

Somewhere much too close at hand, someone was screaming.

F
ATHER JOHN KELLY DIDN’T
know what he was going to do if Dan Murphy was at the studio when he came in for rehearsal. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought about it before, if not last night, when his head was still full of the press coverage of the possible investigation, then this morning, when Tom Burne was in his office. The truth was, he was having a hard time thinking about anything at all. He had been aware for a while now that something was wrong, not with the world but with himself. Little things he had always been able to handle had begun to feel beyond him. He had even found himself sympathizing with the people some of the other priests down in the chancery had called “The Tridentine Cheerleading Squad.” It was a priest joke unlikely to make any sense to outsiders. It had to do with the reams of people—there seemed to be more of them all the time—who had never really gotten used to Vatican II. The Tridentine was the old Mass, the one most of the new priests considered stuffy, pompous, and excruciatingly “negative.” It was supposed to represent everything that had been wrong with the pre-Council Church, from weekly confession to rosary novenas. Father John Kelly was beginning to realize he missed it.