Marlene leaned over and kissed the angel that had accidentally been placed in her womb through some celestial mix-up. If I could only be half as wise, she thought. “Friday it is then,” she said.
When she returned to the living area, Lucy had gone off to her room. The two men were still sitting at the kitchen table talking amicably, Butch with a glass of Chianti in his hand and Jojola with a can of Coke. Looking at her husband she felt a longing stir starting at her navel and drifting down. He still rings my chimes, she thought and found herself hoping that the evening’s conversation wouldn’t last too long; she had other plans for her man.
Still, Marlene hesitated to turn the discussion to more serious matters. He wasn’t going to be happy that she was mixed up in yet another bloody adventure. How do I explain killer pedophile priests and murderous sheriffs and cowboys who arrive in the nick of time? She had to admit that it all sounded like a bad movie. And he’s never going to understand that I wasn’t looking for trouble. It found me…again.
Butch looked up at her and smiled. His eyes drifted to her body and the warm slow feeling started all up again. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble. It did give her hope. As long as he was horny, he wouldn’t start lecturing her or giving her the cold shoulder. She sat down next to him and let her knee fall over against his leg and tried to send him her thoughts through osmosis.
In the end, it was Butch who steered the conversation to the less inviting by asking Jojola, “So what brings you to our fair city?”
“I heard that some guy gave some relatives of mine a down payment of about twenty-four dollars in beads for this island, and I thought I’d try to collect the late mortgage payments,” Jojola joked. “Or I might have to foreclose on behalf of the owners.”
Karp laughed. “Believe me, you don’t want it. As a matter of fact, since you’re representing the landlord, I have a leaky sink, the air conditioner doesn’t cool in the summer, and the heater doesn’t heat in the winter.”
“In that case, I defer to your wife.” Both men turned to Marlene, who suddenly felt like a deer in the headlights. Marlene gave Jojola a dirty look and said, “So what would you like to know?”
“Well, the message I got was you were…ahem…‘involved in something.’ And since you couldn’t talk about it, I’m reasonably sure it’s not ‘involved’ as in ‘involved in my art classes.’ As much as I hesitate to ask, what gives?”
Marlene looked at Jojola. “I told you he’d be suspicious.” But she took a deep breath and launched into the Ciampi version of “What I did on my summer vacation.” As she laid out the tale, she watched her husband’s expression turn pale and then drain of all color when she mentioned the rosary beads in the graves.
“Did these beads have a medallion attached?” he asked. “A gold St. Patrick’s?”
Now it was Marlene’s and Jojola’s turn to stare at him. “How did you know,” they asked in tandem.
“I recently saw two sets just like that,” he said. “They were found in the graves of two boys buried sometime last summer in Central Park.”
“Could there be two such killers?” Jojola wondered.
“Not likely,” Marlene said. “Unless, I guess, this was some sort of cult thing. But since we believe that Hans Lichner flew back to New York, meaning he was probably from here in the first place, there’s no reason to think it was anybody else.”
“Lichner?” Karp asked.
Marlene explained the rest of their story, including breaking into the St. Ignatius Retreat. “We found a fax transmission dated last Sunday to some priest at the New York archdiocese that pretty much spelled out how dangerous Lichner is and that this quack psychiatrist Tobias was sending him home from summer camp.”
“And you said he kills once every full moon?” Karp asked. “Because that’s what the scientists who are helping us with the Central Park case think, too. Which means we have less than two weeks to find him before he does it again. What was the name of the priest the fax was sent to?”
“O’Callahan.”
For the second time since the conversation began, Marlene saw her husband look like someone had punched him in the stomach. “What’s the matter?”
“I think I met a Father O’Callahan at a recent fund-raiser. He’s with the archdiocese.”
“So what’s the rub? You get the cops to pick him up and we ask him about Lichner.”
“It may be a more delicate situation than that,” Karp said. “He’s the archbishop’s secretary.” He stopped and rubbed his eyes. “Damn, this has not been a good month for making friends with the powers that be in New York City. Next thing you know, George Steinbrenner will be on my case, too.”
“What do you mean?” Marlene asked.
“Well, since you’ve been gone, and in addition to my usual forays into alienating most people I meet, I’ve managed to antagonize, aggravate, or anger the New York Police Department, a former DA-turned-federal judge, one of our hero cops from 9/11 who is dirty and probably a murderer, and topped it all off with becoming a threat to maybe the most wealthy and powerful man in the city of New York, a man who will probably also be our next mayor.” He let that mouthful sink in for a moment. Then it was his turn to fill in his wife and her friend on his summer so far.
Marlene whistled. “Whew, you have been busy. Guess I don’t have to worry that you’ve had time to carry on an affair or get into drugs.”
“Both would have been safer courses to pursue,” he replied. “But at least, thanks to you, we have a lead for our Central Park case, as well as your homicides, John. It would be nice to have one of these headaches dissolve with an arrest and adjudication. Then I could concentrate on the No Prosecution files.”
“I hope you’ll be careful handling the Lichner case,” Marlene blurted out.
“Why, thank you for the concern, my love,” Karp said smiling.
“You’re welcome, but that’s not how I meant it this time. A case like this could hurt a lot of innocent people. If it’s true that someone close to the archbishop is participating in covering up the existence of a possible serial killer in the priesthood, it would scandalize the church and cause serious pain to a population of devout and decent people.”
“And?” Karp was trying to understand where Marlene was going with this. Normally, she was the one who went in guns ablazing while he preferred the slow, thoughtful approach.
“Aannnnd…you don’t understand because you’re not Catholic,” she said. “It’s not like with a Protestant minister—although I concede someone like Jimmy Baker can do a lot of damage to people’s faith. But Archbishop Fey is the pope’s representative in New York, which means he is God’s representative here, too, for more than a million Catholics just in the greater metropolitan area of New York. And that number is conservative. I’m just saying you need to think about how this is going to go down.”
“We’ll do the right thing,” Karp replied.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
The conversation ended when Lucy emerged from her bedroom and announced that she was going for a walk as soon as she got off the telephone with Ned Blanchet back in New Mexico. “He says he misses me and that at least two stars fell from the sky last night after we left,” she gushed to her mother.
“That’s nauseatingly romantic,” Marlene replied. But her daughter had already retreated back to her bedroom.
“Isn’t it dangerous for her to go out at night in New York?” Jojola asked.
“Yes, just like it was dangerous for her to be with me last Sunday morning,” Marlene said. “Different kind of danger. But Lucy was born and raised in this city, she knows what to avoid. Besides, after all she’s been through, it’s kind of pointless to try to tell her it’s a hazardous world and to be careful.”
Jojola nodded and rose from his seat. “In that case, I think I’ll go for a walk, too,” he said. “I’m not used to spending so much time indoors at once; I got here at three and haven’t been out since. If I’m going to be in New
York, I’d like to see a little of it.”
Marlene gave him the security code to the outside door and a key to get into the loft. She also instructed him on the general guidelines for finding his way around their part of downtown, and then stuffed a note with their home telephone number in his shirt. “In case you get lost, you can call and we’ll get a cab to bring you back,” she said. “Now be in for curfew, don’t associate with the riffraff, and if a woman walks up and propositions you who looks sort of like a pretty man, she/he is a pretty man.”
“Thanks, Mom,” he said.
“I’d go with you to keep you safe, my son,” she said, “but I have something I…ummm…want to discuss with my husband…a personal matter that can’t wait.”
“That’s more than I needed to know. Have fun,” he said and left.
Ten minutes later, Lucy bounded out of her room looking like someone had scrubbed her cheeks with steel wool, did a single pirouette, and sailed out the door with a “Ta-ta, see you in an hour or so.”
“What was that?” Karp asked. “She looked like she has a fever.”
“That, my tall, dark, and handsome, was the rosy blush of love,” Marlene said. “Tell you about it some other time.”
“What about Dan?”
“What about him? She’s not engaged. And do you want to talk about boys, or do you want to talk about these,” she said, pulling her sweatshirt over her head to expose her breasts.
“Those,” he freely admitted.
“Well, then, let’s get busy, we only have an hour until she gets back.”
“Only an hour?” he pouted.
“Only an hour in which I will feel free to scream my fool head off with pleasure. The boys are sound sleepers.”
“Oh.”
“So what are you waiting for?”
“I want to watch you take off the rest.”
“Oh.”
• • •
Lucy was sure that by the time she reached the lobby, her parents would already be in bed making those noises that she’d grown up with, which to her meant they were still in love and therefore all was right with the world. Until recently, she’d thought she would never want to be placed in a position—pun intended, she giggled—to be making those noises herself. But there was nothing quite like a romantic young cowboy riding to the rescue to put a romantic young woman in the mood for love.
As she dressed to go out that night, she’d paused with her shirt off to look in the mirror. She was proud of the red marks his rope had left on her sides and wished they wouldn’t fade; she considered having the image of a rope tattooed around her body. Oh my God, where did that come from, she thought and laughed out loud. But I do think my breasts are getting bigger. She remembered how carefully he had touched them when she encouraged it the night of her rescue. “They’re not eggs, you dolt, give ’em a squeeze…and you may kiss them if you’d like,” she’d told him. He had certainly liked, but that was as far as she let him go—or actually as far as she told him to go, as he would never have attempted such liberties on his own. She was surprised how much she’d liked it, too, even more that not a single thought of Felix Tighe crossed her mind. Not until later.
As she stared in the mirror and tried to imagine what a little more weight would do for her figure, her mind flashed on her old boyfriend, Dan Heeney. But she shoved him back out of her thoughts just as quickly. Right now, I need a cowboy not a rocket scientist.
However, neither Ned nor Dan was on her mind as she made her way down Grand to the subway station. She didn’t notice that two men began following her after she left the loft building; the first man, an older but well-knit Asian intent on her, the second man, close in size and musculature, intent on him.
At the station, Lucy walked down the flight of stairs to the turnstiles where she purchased a new Metro card and pushed on through. She skipped down another flight of stairs and caught the number 9 train to the south end of the island. There, she climbed back out into the open air and headed south until crossing the street into Battery Park. Her two shadows—one behind the other, hardly noticeable, except to a trained observer—slipped into the shadows of the trees and kept pace.
• • •
John Jojola had been standing across Grand Street when Lucy left the building. He considered hailing her to see if she wanted company, but she immediately set off at a brisk pace that implied she had something going on besides a stroll. He was about to turn and go his own way, but then he saw the other man leave the restaurant supply store on the first floor of the building and walk in the same direction as Lucy.
Jojola considered the man for a moment. He seemed vaguely familiar, which surprised him as he did not know any Asian men in New Mexico. Perhaps it is just that he walks like someone I used to know. But who he could not recall, so he wrote the feeling off to coincidence in a strange place.
• • •
After deciding to go to New York to try to find Lichner, Jojola and the two women had split up in case someone was watching. The women had checked out of the Sagebrush Inn early Tuesday morning and drove a rental car to Denver, where they caught a flight on Wednesday morning. He’d waited until Tuesday night and then slipped out of the reservation, staying low in the backseat of a police cruiser driven by Officer Small Hands, who’d taken him to Albuquerque to catch a plane. “If anybody calls the office and asks where I am, tell them I’m at the pueblo for a kiva ceremony and can’t be disturbed.”
He’d arrived at La Guardia two hours after the women, a stranger in a strange land, indeed. The first thing he noticed when he got into the city was the air; it tasted used, as if it had been in and out of hundreds of other mouths by the time it got to his. The second thing was the noise. It ebbed and flowed, changing subtly all the time—like standing next to the Rio Grande River—and loud. And there was always something adding to it; he’d been startled the first time a subway passed beneath the sidewalk he was standing on with a roar and shaking of the ground, like an angry beast trapped beneath the surface. He found it odd that the people walking around him didn’t seem to notice the noise, or at least weren’t disturbed by it. Personally, he wondered how anyone could hear themselves think with such a racket going on all the time.
Then there were the buildings. He’d felt like such a tourist—a despised species in New Mexico and tolerated only for their money—craning his head back to look up until his neck hurt. Some of them were more beautiful than he had imagined buildings could be, sculptures of steel, stone, and glass competing with their neighbors for space and attention. In a way, they reminded him of the mesas and rock formations of his native land with their terraced sides and massive walls. But he also felt oppressed by how they closed in on him, as if trying to block out the sky and weigh him down.
Yet, to him the most interesting aspect of New York was the people. He’d never seen or imagined—not even recalling his brief sojourn in Los Angeles and the occasional trip to Denver—that so many people could live in one place without driving each other insane. He wondered where they went for privacy, or a little peace and quiet.
When he first arrived at Crosby and Grand, he didn’t immediately go to the building where Marlene and her family lived. He was waiting for a signal they prearranged, so he’d used the time to people-watch and there was certainly plenty to choose from.
They moved in human rivers down the sidewalks, some following swifter currents, while others drifted along. Most, however, seemed to walk like they had someplace important to go, except the obvious tourists—who stood around looking up at the tall buildings or simply looking lost—and the obvious homeless people, who were lost but in a different way. The purposeful people kept their eyes straight ahead; they did not smile or try to engage their fellow New Yorkers. He experimented by trying to catch their eyes and then smiling, but if they looked at him at all, they quickly looked down or away again, as if they’d been caught doing something illegal.
The sheer number of vehicles impressed him
, too, as they roared, honked, and swarmed like herd animals along the streets. It reminded him of Canadian geese heading south for the winter, as he watched great flocks of yellow taxis move as one, sticking close as if there was safety in numbers.
Eventually Lucy had emerged from the building carrying a shopping bag. She gave him a knowing look and then walked two blocks before entering a bookstore, where she went into the rest room. When she emerged, she wasn’t carrying the bag. He went in after her and found a ball cap and a pair of gray coveralls with what appeared to be a hand-stenciled logo on the back that read Soho Heating and Air. He got the idea—this was his disguise—and put on the coveralls and tucked his hair up under the cap. He went back to the loft building, where he buzzed to be let in.
Jojola was surprised when he stepped out of the loft building that night to find that the noise was still there. Perhaps not as intense overall, but punctuated more often by sirens and car horns. He noticed that there was a sort of overarching background sound and wondered if it could be the collective beating of the eight million hearts Marlene had told him lived in the City.
One of those hearts had come running up to him inside the body of an odd little fellow with coarse brown-and-gray hair, some of which poked up from the neck and sleeves of his T-shirt as if he had fur. “You need help?” he asked, panting. “Something I can find for you. Anything, anything at all…drugs, girls, boys…perhaps a priest, perhaps you are in need of spiritual guidance?” The man danced around him, skittish of the people who passed near them.
Jojola shook his head, noting the man’s curiously yellow eyes. “Not tonight, brother,” he said.
“Okay, okay, okay,” the man yapped. “Be careful. Be careful. Evil is afoot.” The man ran off howling down the sidewalk, dodging in and out of people, who ignored him.
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