The Big Bad City (16 page)

“Did she give you a name?” Meyer asked.

“Yes. But it probably wasn’t her real name.”

“What name did she give you?”

“Marilyn Monroe.”

“What makes you think that wasn’t her real name?” Meyer asked.

“Marilyn Monroe?”

“We once arrested a guy named Ernest Hemingway, he wasn’t Ernest Hemingway.”

“Who was he?”

“He was Ernest Hemingway. What I mean is, he wasn’t
the
Ernest Hemingway, he was just someone who happened to be named Ernest Hemingway.”

“Who’s that?” Schwartz asked. “Ernest Hemingway.”

“I’ll bet we look in the phone book right this minute,” Meyer said, “we’ll find a dozen Marilyn Monroes.”

“Which wasn’t
her
real name, either,” Schwartz said.

“What
was
her real name?” Kling asked.

“The girl who brought the ring in?”

“No. Marilyn Monroe.”

“I don’t know.”

“So what’d this woman look like?” Meyer asked. It bothered him now that he couldn’t remember what Marilyn Monroe’s real name was. Kling had a habit of bringing up annoying little questions that could bug a man all day long.

“She was maybe thirty, thirty-five years old,” Schwartz said. “Five-four, weighed a hundred and ten, brown hair, brown eyes, nice trim figure. Wearing shorts and a T-shirt … well, this rotten weather. Sandals. Blue sandals.”

“You noticed what she had on her
feet?
”

“Woman in shorts, a nice trim figure, you notice her legs and her feet.”

“Did she give you an address?”

“She did. Which is why I figured maybe Marilyn Monroe was her real name, after all. I mean, if a person’s going to pick a phony name, why such a famous one?”

“That’s right,” Meyer said.

“Was what I figured.”

“Norma Something,” Kling said.

“I don’t think so,” Meyer said.

“Also, she gave me a phone number.”

“Did she show you identification?”

“No. She said it was an heirloom she had to hock because she’d left her wallet in a taxi with a lot of money in it.”

“You believed her.”

“It could happen. This city,
anything
could happen. Besides, I was getting a twelve-thousand-dollar ring for three thousand.”

“Ever occur to you it might be stolen?”

“It occurred. It
also
occurred it might only be
lost
. People don’t usually report lost items to the police. So if it wasn’t reported, it wouldn’t show up on any list, am I right? And if it isn’t on a list, then I don’t know it’s stolen goods and I’m still a bona fide purchaser for value. Was what I thought.”

“Can we have the address and phone number she gave you?”

“Sure. You going to take the ring, right?”

“We have to.”

“Sure.”

“We’ll give you a receipt for it.”

“Sure,” Schwartz said. “Sometimes I wish I wasn’t so honest.”

“Jean Something?” Kling said.

It was cooler here in the park. Gentle breezes from the river blunted the edge of the afternoon heat, promising eventual relief, perhaps even rain. Carella sat with
his sister on a bench overlooking the distant water. Her twin daughters were on the playground equipment. Cynthia and Melinda, reduced to Cindy and Mindy, as Carella had dreaded would happen from the moment she named them. Her older daughter had fared better. Tess, modern and sleek, for Teresa, which conjured up cobblestoned streets in a mountaintop village in Potenza. Tess was supervising the twins now. Seven years old and looking after the little ones. Cindy and Mindy had been born on the twenty-eighth of July, eleven days after his father was killed. They reminded him of his own twins when they were small. It occurred to him that his sister was one of the few people in the world who knew him when he himself was small. Forty, he reminded himself. In October, you will be forty.

“It was good of you to meet me,” Angela said.

“It’s no trouble,” he said.

It was four o’clock, and he was on his way home, but he’d have met his sister whenever, wherever, because he loved her to death. She had specified the park, it would be cooler than her apartment, she’d said. We have to talk, she’d said. He waited now for her to begin. In his profession, he was skilled at waiting for people to begin talking.

“It finally looks as if it’s going to be a clean break,” she said.

She was talking about her divorce. Married for twelve years, and now a divorce. He would always remember the date of her wedding. He had rushed Teddy to the hospital directly from the reception. Twelve years ago this past June. His twins had turned twelve on the twenty-second. And he would be forty in October. Cut it out, he thought. It’s not the end of the world. Oh no? he thought.

“Tommy’s moving to California. I think he met a girl who lives out there, he’s leaving at the end of the month. It’ll be better, Steve, I really think so. It’s still painful, you know. I mean, whenever he comes by to pick up Tess and the twins, I remember what it used to be like. It’s painful, Steve. Divorce is painful.”

People who had twins never referred to them as “the kids” or “the children,” they were always “the twins.” He wondered what that must be like for twins themselves, always to be referred to as
half
of a whole, like a comedy team. The last time he’d seen his brother-in-law was when Tommy had told him he was entering a rehab program. That was after the marriage was shot, after he’d stolen and hocked virtually everything they’d owned, after he’d hit Angela with a closed fist one night when she tried to stop him from taking the twins’ silver teething rings that were a gift from Aunt Josie in Florida, Carella wanted to kill him. So now he was moving to California, and Angela thought it would be for the best, which it probably would—but was that why she’d asked to meet him in the park at four o’clock in the afternoon?

He waited.

He was very good at waiting.

“Steve,” she said, and drew a deep breath. “Steve, honey, you’re not going to like this.”

He knew at once what it was. And he knew he was not going to like it,
already
did not like it. But she was his sister, and when he saw the troubled look on her face, he wanted to take her in his arms and say, Hey, come on, Sis, this is me, how bad can it be, huh? But he knew how bad it could be, knew what she was going to tell him, and wondered how he could possibly handle it.

“I know how you feel about Henry,” she said, and drew another deep breath. “I know you think he could have sent Sonny Cole to prison, that somehow he screwed up …”

“Angela …”

“No, please, Steve, let me finish. I’ve talked to him a lot about the case, and he really did do his best, Steve, he really
was
surprised by some of the stuff the defense …”

“He
shouldn’t
have been surprised,” Carella said. “His job is not to be surprised. Sonny Cole killed Papa! And Lowell let him walk.”

“So did you, Steve,” she said.

Which she shouldn’t have thrown back at him because he’d been talking brother to sister when he’d told her about that night in a deserted hallway with only Sonny Cole and a black cop named Randall Wade who kept whispering “Do it” in his ear. He hadn’t told that to anyone else in the world but his wife, and now Angela was throwing it back at him. He had done what he’d thought was the right thing. If he had pulled the trigger on Sonny Cole that night … no, he couldn’t have.

“I believe in the system,” he said now.

“So do I.”

“I thought the system …”

“So did I. But Henry isn’t the system. It was the
system
that let Cole walk after Henry did his best to put him away. You have to believe that, Steve.”

“Why should I?”

“Because we’re moving in together.”

“Great,” he said. “The man who …”

“No.”

“
Yes!
He
did
screw up, Angela. That’s why Sonny Cole is still out there someplace …”

… his arm going up now, his finger pointing out over the small hill above the park, his finger stabbing at the near distance …

“… maybe killing somebody
else’s
father!”

From where Sonny lay on his belly on the grassy knoll overlooking the park below, he thought at first that Carella had spotted him and was pointing at him. He didn’t know who the girl with him on the bench was, but all at once both of them were up on their feet and the girl was hugging him and Carella just stood there looking sort of helpless and foolish and then he …

There was something so familiar about the gesture.

… he brought his hand up and put it on top of the girl’s head, just rested it on top of her head. Watching them, Sonny remembered a time long ago when he had a little sister who’d fallen down and skinned her knee and he’d put his big hand on top of her head just the way Carella was doing with the girl down there in the park, gentling her, soothing her, and he knew all at once that this girl was Carella’s younger sister, same as Ginny had been his younger sister.

He didn’t know why he was all at once trembling.

He got to his feet, and looked once more down the grassy slope. Carella was taking his sister in his arms now, both of them standing there still as stone, crying maybe, Sonny couldn’t tell. Crying maybe for the father he’d killed, maybe crying for him.

He ran off down the other side of the grassy slope, away from the scene below, looking for the green
Honda where he’d parked it, thinking I got to do this soon, I got to do this fucking thing
soon
.

Carella asked the long distance operator for time and charges before he placed his call to California. This was police business and he was but a poor overworked, underpaid servant of the law who hoped to be reimbursed if he put in a chit. It was eight o’clock here in the East, and they had just finished eating dinner. Out there in San Luis Elizario, it was five
P.M.
; he hoped convent nuns didn’t start their evening meal early. He hoped they weren’t still at vespers or something. He hoped Sister Carmelita Diaz, the major superior of the Order of Sisters of Christ’s Mercy was well-rested after her long journey from Rome the day before. He hoped God had whispered in her ear the name of the person who had killed Mary Vincent. Or Kate Cochran, as the case might be.

“Hello?” she said. “Detective Carella?”

“Yes, how are you, Sister?”

“Oh, fine,” she said. “A bit of jet lag, but otherwise very good.”

There was only the faintest trace of Spanish accent in her voice. For some reason, he visualized a large woman. Tall, big-boned, wide of girth. Wearing the traditional black habit of the order, the way Sister Beryl had at the Riverhead convent. He thought he could hear birds chirping out there in California. He imagined a Spanish-style structure, all stucco and tiles, arches and parapets, a cream-colored edifice, a monument to God built on the edge of the sea.

“Am I hearing birds?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, all sorts of birds, you’d think St. Francis was here on a visit.”

He dared not ask how old she was. Her voice sounded quite young and robust. Again, he imagined a large woman, perhaps in her early forties.

“Are you by the sea?” he asked.

“The sea? Oh no. Oh dear no. We’re in downtown San Luis Elizario, such as it is. The sea? Dear, no, the sea is forty miles away. Tell me what happened, please. We’re positively
numb
out here, we all knew poor Katie so well.”

He told her she’d been killed, told her that her body had …

“How?” she asked at once.

“Strangled,” he said.

… told her that Kate’s body had been found in a big park here in the middle of the city …

“Grover,” she said.

“Yes. You’ve been here?”

“Many times.”

… here in the middle of the city not far from the police station, actually. This was last Friday night, the twenty-first. He told her he’d been talking to many of her friends and associates, sisters in the order, doctors and nurses she worked with, a priest named Father Clemente …

“Our Lady of Flowers,” she said.

“Yes.”

“A wonderful man.”

… but that so far they hadn’t the faintest clue as to why she’d been killed. Unless there was something about her they yet didn’t know. Something she may have revealed to Sister Diaz …

“Oh, call me Carmelita, please,” she said. “I always feel if I have to call myself ‘Sister’ to let people know
I’m a nun, then I’m not getting Christ’s message across. They should realize I’m a nun just by taking one look at me.”

“Trouble is, I can’t see you,” Carella said.

“I’m five-five and I weigh a hundred and sixteen pounds. I have short brown hair and brown eyes, and right now I’m smoking a cigarette and sitting in the sunshine in a small garden outside my office. Which is why you’re hearing all the bird racket. What makes you think Kate was hiding something?”

“I didn’t suggest that.”

“But something about her is troubling you. What is it, Detective?”

“Okay,” he said. “We think someone may have been trying to blackmail her.”

Carmelita burst out laughing.

Her hearty laugh fortified the image of a large woman in a roomy habit. Five-five, he reminded himself.

“That’s absurd,” she said. “What could anyone hope to extort from a
nun?
”

Echoes of Lieutenant Peter Byrnes, thank you.

“Then was she in debt? She seemed very concerned about money.”

“Are you talking about her budget? I’m afraid she was always complaining about the budget. Never had enough to spend. Always asked me to loosen up a little. Give me a break here, will you, Carmelita? Let me go buy a good pair of shoes every now and then. The problem may have come from being on the outside. Each sister in the order receives a standard diocesan stipend, you see, in our case ten thousand a year. Half of that comes back here to San Luis, to support the mother
house and any sisters who are retired or ill. Kate’s salary came here, too. As a licensed practical nurse, she earned almost fifty thousand a year. The mother house budgeted her according to her needs, apportioning enough for her to live on. She
did
take vows of poverty, you know. That doesn’t mean she had to starve. But neither does it mean she could live extravagantly.”