Gladyss of the Hunt (19 page)

When Bernie pressed him about the other murder dates, O'Flaherty said he wasn't sure about anything beyond a week ago.
But he was definitely watching the races with Hal and others on any given Friday. He never missed one.

Bernie put the old guy in lockup, then he called the retired cop. Hal said they didn't meet every single Friday, but most weeks they did. As luck would have it, Mary Lynn MacArthur's body was discovered on Friday, but that wasn't enough to rule him out.

“Is there another clerk who might've seen O'Flaherty?”

“No, Rubin leaves the TV off. Keeps his own counsel.”

Bernie thanked him and hung up. Just to be on the safe side, Bernie said we should check O'Flaherty's room.

“Do we have enough to get a warrant?”

“All we need is his parole officer. Bernie called Danny Rasdale and explained that we wanted to search his ex-con's room. He had to reassure Rasdale: “No, no forensic people at this stage, we'll go in on our own first and just look around. If we find anything suspicious, I'll call them after . . . When's your lunch break? . . . Okay, we'll drop by your office and pick you up at noon, then.”

Bernie hung up. Apparently he'd been stood up by parole officers before, and learned the best way to get them to the suspect's residence was to take them there himself.

Now Bernie took a sheet of paper and walked over to the holding cage where O'Flaherty was sitting.

“Make you a deal,” he said to the prisoner, “Let us search your room and we'll cut you loose.”

“You like playing tiddlywinks, don't you?” O'Flaherty smiled. “We both know that since I'm a predicate felon, you don't need my permission. All you have to do is get my PO to join you.”

Bernie turned around and stormed into the hallway.

I followed him out there. “What's the matter?”

“He's on to us.”

“What do you mean?”

“He might be bullshitting, but if he knows we can toss his room, the odds of us catching something in there are pretty damn long.”

We had to try it, though. With O'Flaherty sitting in lockup, at noon Bernie and I headed over to the parole office on Fortieth, where we found ourselves standing in the packed waiting area with all the sad and misbegotten types waiting for Rasdale, who was running late, just as Bernie had predicted.

When he finally came out twenty minutes later, Rasdale turned out to be a walking beer belly. But he moved surprisingly quickly. In about five minutes we were in O'Flaherty's squalid lobby just around the corner. Hal gave us a passkey and together we went up in an incredibly slow elevator to his room on the top floor. His private bathroom looked like it had never been cleaned, but his room was spotless. His clothes were all on hangers or folded in a cardboard box. His bookcase was stuffed full but neat. Even his bed was made.

The only unsavory thing about the room was a faint odor of horse shit. Rasdale explained that O'Flaherty liked to visit the stables over on Forty-fifth Street. Apparently he was friends with one of the buggy drivers.

There was little by way of display: a couple of library books (overdue, I checked) stacked next to his bed, some disability insurance documents taped to the back of his door, and over his bed he had stuck up a postcard. I moved closer to look at it and gasped. It was the vision I'd had in class during final relaxation a few days ago. The postcard showed a gleaming golden woman, standing on a pedestal, holding a bow and arrow.

“The place is too fucking clean for a sleazebucket like him,” Bernie was saying to the PO. “He was definitely expecting us.”

“O'Flaherty is really a sad case,” Rasdale said. “He's sharp as a rusty razor. I mean, he's one of my few cons who sounds uptown all the way, but he has this major fucking chip on his shoulder, and it'll always keep him in the gutter.”

“What is it?”

“He believes he was cheated out of his true destiny.”

“He's not dead yet,” I said. “Why can't he reach his destiny now?”

“It's a lot easier to be bitter than to try and succeed,” Bernie said.

“Actually, this isn't even about his life really, it's more about this area,” Rasdale said. “He obsesses about the developers destroying his old neighborhood.”

“When your best days are behind you, it's difficult not to live in the past,” Bernie responded dolefully.

“I tried telling him that he should be a tour guide—he can point to any corner within a ten-block radius of here and tell you who lived where, and what stores and shops came and went over the past forty years.”

” Good for him,” Bernie said. “Almost no one has a clue about this city's past. Hell, we might as well be an overpopulated Provo, Utah.”

“Do you think he's capable of killing and decapitating four women?” I tried to cut to the chase.

“I got a dozen other guys who I'd suggest first, but you never know.”

“He did it,” Bernie said simply.

“Just because he keeps a clean room?” Rasdale asked.

“Our killer is a DNA wiper. Just like this guy.”

“He's got a solid alibi for the evening of Jane Hansen's murder,” I reminded Bernie.

“Yeah and that was the one fucking murder that was different from the others, wasn't it?”

“It wasn't that different,” I said, lifting the untaped bottom of the postcard, so I could read the title:
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Diana, [Greek Goddess of the Hunt]
.

“What the hell are you looking at?” Bernie asked, coming toward me. I didn't want to talk about it because I knew he'd think I was crazy if I told him I'd seen the image in a vision.

“Just a postcard.”

He looked at it for a moment and said, “I met her.”

“You met a Greek goddess, did you?”

“Actually, that was a common fallacy.”

“What was?”

Bernie sighed. “Let me try this again. Ever heard of Evelyn Nesbit?”

“Nope.”

“She was this
It
girl about a hundred years ago, and a lot of people think she posed for that statue, because of the way the story's told in that novel
Ragtime
. The statue used to be on top of the old Madison Square Garden, and Evelyn Nesbit was the lover of Stanford White, the architect who designed it. But she wasn't the model for that”—he pointed to the postcard—“she was only a child when the statue was made.

“And you met her?”

“Yeah, once, in the early 1960s. I was a kid and she was an old lady.”

“And who exactly was she?” I asked.

“A model, and a chorus girl. You know what? Just rent the movie
Ragtime
.” He paused, then added, “Only remember, she didn't actually pose for that statue.”

Rasdale cut in. “So what do you think?”

“I think this is our guy,” Bernie said flatly.

“What exactly is it that tells you it's him?” I asked, intrigued by his rock-hard confidence.

“Intuition,” he replied. “Bert used to say that was the most valuable tool a detective had.”

“He's right,” Rasdale added. “I can feel it in my gut when one of my boys has gone off the reservation.”

While they were chatting, I took a couple steps away, closed my eyes, and tried to push out all external thoughts. Nothing came to me. I took some shallow hyperbreaths and focused on the striking image of the hunter goddess. Then I realized all was oddly silent around me. When I opened my eyes, Bernie and Dan were just staring at me.

“So are you calling CSU or not?” Danny asked Bernie. “Because I got a roomful of ex-cons waiting for me back at the office.”

“No, they won't find anything,” Bernie said.

I looked over the contents of O'Flaherty's bookcase. It was mostly histories of New York City. There were also a handful of books on horse racing; the guy sure loved his ponies. An old tourist book of the city dating back to the '50s had little yellow post-its leafing along the top. And there were three large old picture books showing Times Square over a century ago. There were a couple of general history books, flipping through them, I didn't see any references to Catherine of Alexandria in their indexes.

We walked Rasdale back to the State Parole Office, where we thanked him for his help and watched him hustle up the steps.

“What the hell was going on back there?” Bernie asked me as he pulled out a cigarette.

“What?” I thought he was referring to the postcard of Diana again.

“You, with the closed eyes and deep breathing.”

“Oh, I thought I was getting a migraine,” I lied. If I told Bernie about the whole Kundalini thing, I know he'd transfer me straight back to NSU.

He struck a match, lit his cigarette, and immediately started coughing. I silently nodded.

“Hey, I've smoked for thirty-five years without so much as having to clear my throat,” he said. “This fucking cough is from inhaling two hundred stories of glass, plaster, and everything else that was in those goddamn towers.”

“At the time you were working on the excavation, you couldn't tell the air was toxic?”

“I was wheezing at the time, but the goddamn EPA and every other government agency said it was all fine, just a little dust and smoke—fucking Christine Todd Whitman!”

By the time we got back to the precinct, O'Flaherty had been hauled off to Central Booking. It would take the night to get a court date for skipping out on his parole appointments. Unless he had any other outstanding warrants, he'd be released tomorrow.

At five o'clock, we all conferred on our progress. Of the seven names Alex and Annie were supposed to check out, they had cleared five—two suspects were in prison, two had solid alibis for most if not all of the murders, and the last one had turned up in Potter's Field.

We had five more to go. Though Bernie couldn't shake the feeling that O'Flaherty was the one, the rest of us were doubtful, and felt disappointed that we were running out of suspects. The confidence I'd gained from my Kundalini experience, that vision of Diana, was fading.

While I was on-line, I Googled Diana, Goddess of the Hunt, and was startled to find I had some things in common with her. Diana was said to have been a tall blonde—like me. Also, like me, she had a twin, the god Apollo. Okay, my brother Carl was hardly a god, but we were close to one another, like Diana and Apollo apparently were. Then it got even more personal: I read that Diana had remained a virgin, even if it was for different reasons than mine. She supposedly prayed to Zeus not be distracted by the confusion of sexual desire so she could stay focused on her sacred mission, which was the protection of childbirth. So she was the goddess of hunting, but she was also a sworn defender of women. Which was kind of my role in life, too. All that gave me something to think about.

After the humiliation of being stared at in O'Flaherty's hotel room, I decided to skip the beginner's class, which was mainly stretches, and try the master class later that night. The Renunciate
hadn't arrived when I got there. For the other members of the class, it seemed to be Off-White Pajama Day: two heavy, older men with long scraggly beards bookended two emaciated older women. They all wore turbans. They all had their hands folded, their eyelids closed, and seemed to be on some higher plane of consciousness. I feared that once they opened their eyes and saw I had sneaked in, they'd toss me the hell out for not being in uniform. After a moment though, hoping that maybe I might gain some guidance from these learned elders, I took a deep gulp of their air and spoke softly to the nearest lady, “How did you know when you first released your Kundalini?”

Their eyes all popped open and for a moment I thought they were going to laugh.

“There is nothing subtle about it,” she said. I lost myself completely, then I spent the night weeping in supreme ecstasy.”

“I breathed through waves of heat,” the other woman chimed in. “That's how I knew it was happening.”

“That's your chakras running full throttle,” replied the barely younger old man.

“My
Sahasrara
was spinning so fast,” the older woman added.

“As were my
Anahata
and
Vishudda
,” the older old man whispered. I had a feeling these terms might be Sanskrit for the gall bladder and the spleen.

“Have any of you ever
seen
anything unusual while this was happening?”

“I think I know what you're getting at,” said the older woman. “It must be scary if you don't know what you're seeing. You're seeing a person's aura.”

“What's that?”

“Usually a color radiating from them,” the other woman replied, and the first one nodded.

“Have any of you ever seen anything like an image of a statue?” I asked, tiring of the new age bullshit.

“A statue?” one repeated, while the others shook their heads. “That sounds more like a Christian thing. There are no statues here.”