Prayer (31 page)

About a mile short of the Galveston bridge, the cell rang. Thinking it was Bishop Coogan, I didn’t answer it right away. Then I glanced down at the caller ID and saw that it wasn’t him but the mystery person who tried calling me earlier. I slowed the car a little and answered it.

“This is Sara Espinosa.”

“Hi there, Doctor. How are you doing?” My voice concealed all of the jangled nerves I was feeling; that was a courtesy to her; you called the FBI to get reassurance, not a dose of someone else’s paranoia and angst.

“I’ve been trying to call you all day. You’re a hard man to get.”

“I’ve been driving all over the place today.”

“Working Sunday, huh?”

“Yes, but it’s not normally like this.” That certainly felt like the understatement of my week. “Sundays usually last about a month for me. Sometimes I think God made Houston to encourage people to go to church.”

“Then he probably made Galveston to encourage people to go to Houston. I’ve never seen a city look this deserted.”

“You’re in Galveston?”

“I called you earlier on to say I was going to be down here. And now here I am. This place—it’s like being in a disaster movie.”

“Is everything all right?”

“I was down here to see an old friend so I thought I’d look you up, that’s all.”

I slowed the car again as I neared the bridge. It felt good talking to her. The prospect of seeing her felt even better. Being with an attractive woman might be a better treatment for my own anxiety than what the doctor in Webster would have ordered.

“Listen, Sara, I’m about to lose the signal on my cell. So come to an address I’ll give you. It’s where I’m living right now. Come over and we can have some coffee.”

“Thanks. But I’m there already. Your colleague, Helen Monaco, gave me your address. Her cell phone number was on the back of your card.” She paused. “I’m afraid I lied to her. I hope you don’t mind, but I told her you’d asked me down there to see you but that I’d lost your address and you weren’t answering your cell phone.”

“I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”

As I put my foot down, I glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was nine-fifteen p.m.—kind of late for anyone to be making a social call in Galveston, especially when they lived in Austin; Austin was a four-hour, two-hundred-mile drive. Even if Sara Espinosa stayed for an hour, she wouldn’t be home before at least two a.m. It seemed curious. Then again, by the standard of everything else I’d experienced in the last couple of hours, it hardly seemed curious at all.

As I neared my own front door, I saw a beautiful sky-blue Bentley Continental Supersports convertible that was parked out front, with Sara Espinosa in the driver’s seat, and I reflected that maybe she just liked driving. If I owned a car like that, a four-hour drive at night might seem like a pleasure.

I pulled up onto the short driveway. Sara got out and walked toward me, looking shapelier than I remembered. She was wearing a white trouser suit and matching sneakers with little gold stripes, not to mention several gold bangles and a gold watch. She looked like one of those Kremlin churches with the rounded gold and white towers—something involving worship anyway.

“Nice car,” I said. “I guess there’s a lot more to human biology than I thought there was.”

“Oh, that,” she said, turning to look at the car as if “that” were a pet cat or a birthmark and not a $300,000 car. “Yes, biology’s been good to me.”

“I didn’t need to see the car to know that,” I said.

She blushed a little, which surprised me, because even as I’d said it, I thought it was probably the kind of sexist remark that a woman like her would find disagreeable. Which told me something in itself; she was a little less combative than the first time we had met, a little less self-assured.

I took my eyes off her and then the car, and fixed them on the horizon for a moment. As well as some significant-looking clouds, the wind was getting up, too; it stirred her blond hair as if she were still driving her car with the top down. Had there been a weather report I’d missed? Maybe that was the problem. Somehow a TV weather report was always more a description of what had happened instead of what was going to happen. But then, as a famous physicist once remarked, prediction is always difficult, especially when it’s about the future, although clearly Nelson Van Der Velden had no such qualms.

“Could be a storm coming in,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, turning to follow my eye line. “Yes, you could be right.”

I yawned. The kava seemed to be working now.

“You’re tired,” she said. “You’ve had a busy day, I can tell. I should really go.”

“No,” I said. “No. Come in. I insist. Before the neighbors start to talk.”

She followed me up the steps to the front door.

“Are they terribly nosy?”

“That was a joke,” I said, ushering her into the hallway. “There aren’t any neighbors. Not really. Most people in this neighborhood upped and left a while ago. Or died for all I know. There’s just me and the grumpy old man up the street. You’re the first visitor I’ve had since I moved into this dump.”

I frowned because it seemed to me that the musty smell that had always filled the diocesan house had been joined by something else. I’d come across a smell like that once before, at Driscoll Street, when we’d come back from vacation to find that the house had suffered a power outage and all the meat in the freezer had spoiled.

“What’s that smell?” I said.

“I can’t smell anything.”

“You can’t?”

“No.” She stepped into the sitting room and looked around politely. “It’s not a dump at all,” she said.

“If I’d known I was going to have a visitor, I’d have cleaned up a bit before I left this morning.”

“No, really, it’s nice. Comfortable. And very masculine. I even like the picture.”

I shrugged. “The guy who lived here before me was a priest, so it’s his taste, not mine.”

“It’s by Stanley Spencer, isn’t it?”

“That’s what it says on the back of the frame.”

“He married a lesbian who refused to consummate the marriage.”

“It can happen to anyone,” I said.

“How does an FBI agent come to be living in a priest’s house, anyway?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Have a seat. I’ll make some coffee.”

“I’d prefer a drink. White wine if you have any.”

“There’s plenty of wine. Good wine. The priest was a bit of a connoisseur. There’s a small wine cellar and a special chiller cabinet with what looks like some quality stuff that I haven’t dared touch. A bottle always seems a bit too much when it’s just for one.”

That was a lie, of course; when you’re drinking on your own, wine just seems to take longer than scotch to work its anesthetizing effect.

Still sniffing the unpleasant air, I threw open some windows and went into the kitchen, checked the garbage disposal and the trash. But finding nothing that seemed to explain the smell, I went downstairs to fetch the wine. I was half inclined to lecture Sara about drunk driving but that seemed less than honest, given the empty bottles of liquor in the trunk of my own car; besides, I hardly thought one glass of white wine was going to do her any harm, even at the wheel of a Bentley.

I carried the bottle upstairs, opened it, and poured us each a large glass, burying my nose in the floral bouquet of the golden wine. I wondered how it would mix with kava, but mostly I didn’t care. I downed a glass and poured myself another. It wasn’t every day an attractive woman turned up on my doorstep. Especially in Galveston.

She sipped the wine. “Delicious. White burgundy is my favorite. And this is the perfect temperature, too. Most people in Texas serve white wine much too cold. And too young. 1995. Well, that’s perfect.”

“You know cars, you know art, and you know wine,” I said. “About the only thing you don’t seem to know is interior decoration. This place is a dump and you know it.”

She took another look around the room and sighed. “Perhaps it’s a little monastic,” she observed. “But that’s what you’d expect with a priest. Even one who enjoys Puligny-Montrachet.”

She swallowed some more of the wine. It did taste good; and I had to admit the wine looked like the Holy Grail, it was so golden in the glass.

“That’s much better,” she said. “Gosh, I needed that more than I thought I did.”

“Me, too.” The wine was mixing well with the kava. I felt good. Better than I’d felt in several hours.

For a moment, neither of us said anything. I glanced awkwardly around the room, wondering what she really thought of the place and, by extension, me.

“Would you like something to eat, perhaps?” I asked.

“With this?” she asked, meaning the wine. “Oh, no. There’s nothing I could possibly eat with wine as good as this. But don’t let me stop you, Agent Martins.”

“No,” I said. “I had lunch. And please, call me Gil.”

“All right. I will. Your accent, I’ve been meaning to ask.”

“I lived in Scotland until I was fourteen.”

“Wow. What was that like?”

“It always feels like a previous personality I left behind.”

“And you like Galveston better?”

I grinned. “No. But I liked Boston. That’s where my family went after Scotland. I’m thinking of moving back there. To Boston. Not to Scotland.”

This was possibly the first moment when I realized that I was considering it. Surely Houston was finished for me. Ruth and Danny were no longer in my life; and probably I’d have to leave the office when Chuck found out that I’d called a suspect who was under surveillance. With any luck, I might persuade the Boston field office to take me on. Or perhaps the Massachusetts State Police.

“I think I was happiest when I was living in Connecticut.”

“Meaning you’re not happy now?”

“Meaning it was where I grew up. I think the place where you grow up always has an extra importance in your life. Don’t you?”

“I never really thought about it,” I lied.

She shivered.

“Are you cold?” I asked.

“A little,” she admitted. “Aren’t you?”

“Maybe the weather is changing,” I said, glancing out the window. To me it still felt really humid, but I wasn’t about to argue with her. “Here, let me fetch you a blanket or something.”

When I returned from the bedroom with a blanket, I found her staring anxiously out of the window.

“The car’s all right there,” I said. “I can guarantee it. The one advantage of living in a ghost town is that there’s no crime. You could leave a thousand bucks on your hand-stitched leather seat and it’d still be there in the morning.”

I wondered if all that was about to change; if someone from the Izrael Church was planning to turn up the next day and murder me in some anonymous way.

“Oh,” she said. “It wasn’t that at all.”

“No?”

She shook her head and smiled a sad little smile as I hung the blanket on her shoulders. We sat down on the sofa. She swallowed some more of the wine.

“God, this is good wine,” she said.

“Isn’t it?” I lifted the holster off my belt and laid it on the table.

She looked up at the ceiling as if my small talk was becoming just too minute to bear; or maybe she just couldn’t bear to look at the gun. I picked it up and moved it onto the floor beside my foot.

“Don’t you find it lonely, living here?” she asked. “I mean, it’s so very quiet. I’ve been sitting outside for a while and saw no one.”

I nodded. “Yes, it is quiet,” I said. “Very. But right now I don’t have much choice about where I live. My wife is divorcing me and I’m going to need all my money for a good lawyer. Or, for that matter, a bad one. This house comes rent-free. I have a friend who’s a bishop. He lent me this house while I’m looking around for something else.”

“Sounds like a good friend to have.”

I smiled thinly. I hardly wanted to open up that one for discussion, either.

“You’re very brave, I think,” she said, “living here among all this—this disappointment and ruin. I couldn’t do it. I think I would probably be afraid of all kinds of things.”

“I have a gun,” I said. “All kinds of things can usually be shot.”

“Yes. There is that, I suppose. You don’t have to hide it, you know. I don’t mind the sight of it at all. The gun, I mean. It makes me feel secure.” She smiled. “And so do you.”

“I’m very glad to hear it.” I placed the holstered Glock on the coffee table in front of us, which strangely seemed to bring her comfort. “There. How’s that?”

“It’s getting dark.” She got up again and went to the window and looked one way and then the other as if she expected to see someone she knew.

“You’ve come a long way for a shooting lesson,” I joked. “If that’s why you’re here. And I really do think Mr. Hindemith might complain if we start shooting in the backyard.”

“Did you say Hindemith? Like the composer?”

“Hindemith. Yes, that’s what I said. Although I didn’t know about the composer. He’s the old man who lives up the street.”

She lifted her eyebrows and shook her head.

“What about him, anyway?” I asked.

“It’s odd, but my first husband’s name was Hindemith. Charles Hindemith.”

“Oh, yes. I forgot about all your husbands. Do you have one living in Galveston?”

“No. It’s just that it’s hardly a common name.”

“If you say so.”

“But then Charles was hardly a common man. Which is why I married him. He was a professor of English literature, at Yale.”

“I’m guessing he was older than you.”

“Oh, yes. Much. I was twenty-one, he was sixty-five. Charles was very stimulating to be with. He had a brilliant mind.”

Carefully, I asked her what had happened to him—carefully because I had the very strong recollection that the Mr. Hindemith up the street had said that
his
name was Charles, and I hardly wanted her to think that her first husband was living less than a hundred yards away—especially as Sara seemed so very obviously nervous about something else.

“He died. He had a heart attack not long after I married him.”

I felt a small sense of relief, which was enough for me to give way to the crude thought in my head.

“It figures,” I said. “Hey, I’m sorry. That wasn’t necessary.”