Charisma (31 page)

Susan pushed her new empty tray up next to her full one, took a saucer of green beans, a saucer of asparagus, a saucer of broccoli, and a saucer of fried zucchini and headed on down the line. The first of the men who had spoken was speaking again. He sounded jealous as hell.

“Marsha Deverborn gets all the luck,” he was saying. “You know what she had the other day? A locked dick case.”

Susan piled four cups of coffee, thirty creams, and enough sugar to sweeten Australia onto her tray and headed for the cash register. In between there was a display of desserts and she took one piece of chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, two brownies, and a cupcake. Then she pushed the whole mess up to the black woman sitting on the swivel chair at the end of the line and said,

“What in the name of God is a locked dick case?”

The black woman was staring at the ceiling. She was heavy without being fat and pretty in a late-nineteen-fifties sort of way. Her hair had been straightened and teased into a flip and she was wearing too much eye makeup.

“Well,” she said, “there are these women out there, they say they want some man to get close to them, they don’t really want some man to get close to them. So they get right to the point, if you understand what I mean, and there he is, stuck straight in, and these women have this kind of spasm, it’s psychological, and they lock down and they don’t come open—”

“Marvelous,” Susan said.

“They always talk like that,” the black lady said, looking up the line to the two men in white, as if she had overheard the entire conversation. She couldn’t have. “They put these intern people in the emergency room for six months, it’s six months without sleep, they all get crazy. Don’t get many locked dick cases, though. Somebody must have got lucky.”

“That’s what the man said.”

“You got a lot of food on those trays,” the black lady said. “You gonna eat all that?”

“I’m going to take them up to PICU. There’s a woman up there waiting for a sick child to wake up. I don’t think she’s eaten in days.”

“PICU is the worst,” the black lady said. “I just hope you have the money for all that, because subsidized or not, honey, this place ain’t cheap.”

Susan had the money. She also had a skill very few people had, that came in very useful under the circumstances: she could carry up to four fully-loaded rectangular trays at a time without dropping anything. It was something she had learned as a canonical novice when she, like every other canonical novice, had been assigned to waiting on tables for the professed sisters at dinner. At the time, she would not have said it was an experience she would ever be grateful for. Now she was.

She hitched the trays across her shoulder and arm and headed for the elevators, walking her nun walk, as fast as a run but not so jerky.

Upstairs, Susan Murphy came out of the elevator with both trays still perfectly poised on her left arm, put them down on the coffee table without spilling, and said, “I won’t make you eat all of it, but I may make you eat half of it.”

She was so charged up by her run to the cafeteria, she had noticed nothing except for the fact that Denny’s mother was still in the waiting room and still pressed against the plate glass. She had certainly not noticed that the cop shift had changed, or that the cop who was standing in front of her now was recognizable to her as a cop only because she knew him.

“What the hell,” Pat Mallory asked her, “are you
doing
here?”

I
N THE BEGINNING, HE
had not been worried about when they found the bodies. Once he had killed them they were out of his hands—consigned to God, as Sister Mathilde would have said—and he had felt that there was something wrong with taking an interest in what would happen to them next. Now, it was different. He was so very close to the end, but the end couldn’t come unless all the bodies had been found first. His charism was more than a gift from the Holy Spirit. It was a work of art, with parameters and brush strokes and a source of light. It started with Susan Murphy and it ended with her—because she was
his
sister,
his
link with the evil that caused the pain. In the middle there were examples and expositions, necessary judgments. If they had all been found together, or at once, there would have been a manhunt, too much publicity, too much danger. If they weren’t found at all, nobody would know what he was doing. It was necessary in the long run, that everybody know what he was doing.

He had just come from The Apartment—or, to be exact, from a hole in the ceiling of The Apartment, accessed from a hole in the floor of the empty apartment above—and he was finding it hard to walk. Even now, free of them all, on his own and untouchable, he was never
entirely
free when he went to The Apartment. He had to be careful not to give himself away, which meant he had to be careful not to move. He had only a small slit in the ceiling cover to look through, which meant he had to hold his eye steadily against it or miss seeing what he’d gone to see. What he’d gone to see this afternoon was the destruction of a boy named Stuart Harding, who was seven.

Now he was down on the Congo again, feeling jumpy. He had stolen a paper at the newsstand on Chapel Street and read it by the light of the only street lamp on Amora. There was a lot inside it about Marietta O’Brien and a piece on the boy who had lived that basically said nothing. There was nothing about the other one, lying in her apartment in that Spanish neighborhood across town, and he was beginning to be afraid. She had been a mean woman and a lonely one, not a mess of ineffectual sadness like Margaret Mary McVann. When he had knocked at her door she had snapped at him, and then given him a long lecture on what a sin it was to go slumming. It had almost made him laugh. What she had seen of him was just his skin. He was white and that was all she had wanted to know. She had simply assumed that he must be from a rich family uptown, down in the barrio looking for drugs—
she
called it the
barrio,
the Spanish people he had met up to then had called it the
neighborhood
or the
parish.
He had stared at his sneakers and sucked in his cheeks to keep from screaming at her. His sneakers were full of holes. He had pulled them out of a trash can on Prospect Street the day after he had escaped from The Apartment. On that day he had been dressed in beautiful clothes, expensive things from the troves that had arrived at The Apartment’s door every week, via one of the johns who went out of town to buy it. The johns liked the boys to be well dressed, well fed, well washed, well groomed. They wanted to think they were giving the boys a Better Life than the one they would have had if they’d stayed where they’d been found. The johns never asked about where the boys had been found, or if they’d wanted to leave. Asking questions like that made things too complicated.

He hadn’t dared keep the clothes once he left The Apartment, because they stood out. There weren’t that many boys on the streets of New Haven wearing sixty-dollar sneakers and two-ply cashmere sweaters. He hadn’t wanted to keep the clothes, because they were like a brand. Walk down the street dressed like that and everyone knew you were a whore. Every john in creation perked up his antennae and followed them to your door. Johns popped out of gas stations and police stations and restaurants and put their hands on their wallets. He had needed some old clothes. He had found them in the only place he knew of where old clothes lived: the Salvation Army. He had broken in there after dark and taken what he needed, everything but the sneakers, because they hadn’t had any sneakers in his size. Then he had stripped to the skin and changed. He had not, however, thrown the expensive clothes away. He had other uses for them. He had been on his honor to give them back to the man who had bought and paid for them.

The woman down in the barrio, or the neighborhood, or the parish, or whatever you wanted to call it, had gone bitter from thinking she was trying to do good. She had been one of those people who think they know what everybody else in the world needs. Like all those people, she had been angry when she found out that nobody else in the world agreed with her. He had waited until she turned her back on him, reaching for a book to prove her point about everything, before he went for her neck. She had had a thick neck and he had found it hard to break.

Later, on his way to see Marietta, he had wondered if he had made a mistake. He couldn’t believe that woman had ever had a vocation to reject. He couldn’t believe she had ever even believed in God. Who she had reminded him of was the old lady that had lived behind their house in Oxford. The old lady had been abandoned by her husband and deserted by her children, and his mother always told him the old lady was on her way to Hell.

What Stuart Harding was was the new boy, the one they had picked up out in North Branford only a week ago. He was an ordinary one, born to a mother who abandoned him, fostered out to a pair of jerks who liked to beat him up. When he had first arrived at The Apartment, he had been covered with bruises from his neck to his knees. There was nothing at all on the parts of him that showed, on his face or hands or neck. It was possible that the man who had brought him in didn’t know about the bruises at all. It made for something of a dilemma when they first stripped him down. No boy was ever allowed to stay at The Apartment if he was damaged. Scars and cigarette burns were a death sentence. Lots of the johns liked to spank and some of them liked to whip, but the equipment kept for those purposes was carefully and custom made. The leather straps made welts when they hit hard enough, but not the kind of welts that lasted. It was the same with the restraints. There was always some john or other who wanted to use handcuffs. For some reason he had never been able to figure out, johns had a positive affinity for handcuffs. They were never allowed to get any near the boys. Instead, the closet in the extra room was full of leather cuffs, leather masks, leather gags—soft leather all of it, beaten until it was pliable, strong enough to tie a boy still but not sharp enough to cut or chafe him.

With Stuart Harding it was touch and go. They stripped him down and checked him over, but with all that black and blue it was hard to tell. Anything could have been hidden under those bruises. He remembered standing in the doorway of the room he shared with five other boys while the men talked it over, the men who were not johns but who brought the johns. On the street they would have been called pimps, but that was not quite accurate. On the street, pimps took a girl’s money and disappeared. They didn’t drum up business. As far as he could tell, all these men did was drum up business. He stood with the door open and the light out in the room behind him, holding his breath. He was already planning his escape and there were things he needed to know.

“Look,” one of the men said, “he’s not circumcised. Finding one that’s not been circumcised is like finding gold.”

“I thought they had to be circumcised,” one of the other men said. “I thought the hospitals insisted on it.”

“Maybe he wasn’t born in a hospital,” the first man said. “Maybe his mother popped him in an alley somewhere between junk hits. Who the hell cares?”

“If his mother had been a junkie he wouldn’t be so bright.”

“All I care about,” the first man said, “is that he hasn’t been circumcised, and we got half a dozen guys who’ll pay a hundred-dollar premium for that.”

“If we keep him for a week, all it will cost us is food,” a third man said. “Then the bruises will have worn off and we’ll know.”

As it turned out, they had had to keep him for more than a week. They had had to keep him for over two months, which was why Stuart was still not turned out when he had escaped, and why he had had to go back today to watch it happen. He could remember with absolute clarity the day it had happened to him—not in the car, but later, in The Apartment, with the man who had first spanked him and then rammed an orange neon dildo up his ass—and from that day to this he hadn’t been able to stay away from it. It was a kind of ritual slaughter. For Stuart Harding it had been less than that, because Stuart Harding had been psychologically dead long before he ever got back to The Apartment. He had blown all his fuses as soon as he had been raped in the car.

He was out on that street again now, the one with all the roosters in the windows. A few more blocks, a few more turns, and he would be back at the church. He wanted to find a church tonight and he would, but not until he had done what he had come to do.

He came to an intersection, checked the street signs—Sullivan and Vane—and turned down Sullivan toward the main drag and Saint Raphael’s Hospital. The houses on Sullivan had mostly been broken up into apartments and were mostly dark. He had recognized on his first trip here that this was a street of single people, never married or widowed or just out on their own. A lot of the nurses from the hospital lived here. So did a little group of nuns, who—according to the one he had talked to, asking directions on the way to that woman’s house—were trying out “an experiment in new forms of living in community.” He had liked the nun very much, even though she wasn’t wearing a habit. She was an older woman with a big mop of hair and a job at Saint Raphael’s as some kind of nurse. A lot of the people who lived on Sullivan Street worked at Saint Raphael’s as nurses.

He went down a block on Sullivan Street, and then another block, and then another, and stopped in front of the house where he had killed her. Her apartment was on the second floor, and it was dark. He had left it dark after he cut her, because although he needed her found he didn’t want her found right away. Now he saw that all the other apartments in her building were dark, too. If she disappeared for a while, nobody would notice, except to be relieved. Nobody would go out looking for her.

There was a phone booth up at the far end of the block. He hesitated for a moment more, staring at her windows, wondering what she was like up there, if there were mice that had come out of the walls and eaten her. Then he walked down the street to the phone and dialed 911.