A Quiet Belief in Angels

by R.J. Ellory

  Bridget stayed behind, attending to some family matter. The first bus I missed, the second was delayed for some reason. I could have walked but chose not to. For a little while I looked in some bookstores, and then I sat in the station and read a discarded newspaper until we were asked to board. By the time I left I knew I’d be late by the better part of two hours.

  Morrison waved aside my lack of punctuality, and was as generous and effusive as always. “These things are built,” he kept telling me. “We build these things slowly. We publish one book, and then we publish another. We make people take notice. We persist until we succeed.”

  I returned in the early evening. The wind was sharp. I took a bus to the station near Throop and Quincy and stopped at a deli to warm myself before the walk home. I ordered a cup of coffee and struck up a brief conversation with the waitress, a middle-aged woman with a ready smile, and then walked the three or four blocks home. My meeting with Morrison had inspired me to write another book, to plow my heart and soul into it, and I was eager to speak with Bridget, to elicit her encouragement and bold ideas.

  My thoughts spilled over. I found myself mumbling to myself as I walked, mumbling through my chattering teeth, and I smiled at my foolishness. I walked faster. I knew Bridget would have arrived by now, would be waiting for me to tell her of Manhattan; of where our lives would be headed.

  I turned the corner at the top of the street. Within thirty yards I could see the house. The lights were on, all of them, and yet everything about the place—the eaves, the plankboard steps, the rough yard of hard earth between the sidewalk and the wall—gave off an atmosphere of being too late.

  I stopped. Puzzled.

  I heard a radio playing through an upper window behind me, the warmth of the crooner’s voice:

  . . . and for every broken heart there was a promise, and in every broken promise was a sigh, and with every sigh your face I did remember, and with every memory I bro-oke down and cried . . .

  I started walking again, slower this time. Something was awry. Something challenged my sense of expectation.

  It was then that I saw the black-and-white patrol car.

  I started running. I thought of Letitia Brock, her difficult hip, the way she swayed as she walked, the fierce grip that held her to the banister as she made her way down the narrow stairwell. My heart missed a beat. I went from the sidewalk at a sprint, hurtled across the road and through the gate. The policeman reacted faster than I could see, was out of the car, around the hood, and stood there in the doorway to bar my entry.

  “Hold up there, goddammit!” he shouted. “And where the hell d’you think you’re going?”

  “Inside!” I panted. My chest heaved. A film of sweat varnished my forehead.

  “Not a hope, my friend,” he said. “No one goes inside, not without permission.”

  “I live here!” I said, and reached up to push past him.

  His hand gripped my wrist as I extended my arm. The tension was vice-like, and held me steady.

  “Name?” he asked.

  “Vaughan,” I said. “Joseph Vaughan.”

  The policeman’s eyes widened and his expression became stern as he pulled me closer. He leaned his head back and hollered at the top of his voice. “Sergeant! Got him! Sergeant . . . I got him right here!”

  It seemed to me in that moment that all things that took an age to build came apart in moments. Two decades to build a cathedral. Half an hour of dynamite and there was nothing more than a lungful of dust and a handful of memories.

  Sergeant Frank Lansford had a face like a panel of raw steel, eyes like bulletholes punched through. He moved awkwardly in his clothes, hem too short, sleeves too long, as if some unique shape never witnessed by tailors. His nostrils were uncommonly large, perhaps for the scent of blood, cordite, other indices of mayhem. He sat in Aggie Boyle’s kitchen chair, a chair built for those of regular shape and girth. A man who sought comfort, and found it rarely. No wedding band. Lonely manner that spoke of days filled with official and necessary acquaintance; no friends, no children, no lover, no humor. As if life were now viewed through the concave lens of a bottle bottom: a distended prism that slanted and skewed the world to rights. I believed such a man would have been wise to choose a profession that inspired respect, admiration, other such qualities. Someone, eventually, would have loved him for what he did, forgiven what he was. But no, he was a policeman. A bad choice; he’d lost before he had a chance to win.

  “. . . and you came up here with no weight of family, or so your friend tells me.”

  His voice was edged with suspicion. Everything accusatory, inflammatory.

  I shook my head. “I don’t—” I looked upward, up through the ceiling to the floor of my room. I wanted to go up there. I wanted to see her.

  “Nothing to see,” Lansford had said earlier when he’d come out to meet me on the porch steps.

  “You’re the girl’s lover, right?” was his first question.

  Eyes wide. Wondering what the hell had happened. “Girl?” I’d said. “What girl?”

  Lansford smiled. “Don’t play dumb.”

  “Bridget?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

  “That’s the one,” Lansford replied. “Bridget McCormack. You’re her lover, right?”

  I nodded. Tightening in my chest. Sweating despite the cold. Heart thundering away, ready to burst. Grip on my wrist wouldn’t loosen.

  “And where the hell have you been all day?”

  “Manhattan,” I said. “I went to Manhattan to see someone.”

  “Is that so?” Lansford withdrew a notepad from his pocket, a pen from inside his jacket. Wrote something brief.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I asked. “Why can’t I come inside?”

  Lansford shook his head. “No one goes inside until I say so.” He wrote something else, something longer.

  “Where’s Bridget?”

  Lansford stopped writing and looked down at me. “You don’t know?”

  I shook my head. “Don’t know what? I don’t understand what’s happening. She’s supposed to be here . . . she was supposed to be here by the time I got back.”

  “And you can prove you’ve been in Manhattan, Mr. Vaughan?”

  “Prove? Why would I have to prove anything? Tell me what the hell’s going on here.”

  “Enough already,” the policeman said. “This here is Sergeant Lansford. NYPD. A little respect from you, okay?”

  I looked down at the ground. I couldn’t breathe. “Please,” I gasped. “Please will one of you tell me what the hell is going on here? Where’s Bridget? Has something happened to her? Please, for God’s sake tell me!”

  “Something happened all right,” Lansford said matter-of-factly. “Something sure as hell happened, Mr. Vaughan. It seems someone was upstairs in your room with her—”

  “My room, yes. She would be in my room. That’s where she was supposed to be.”

  “And that’s where she still is, Mr. Vaughan.”

  I exhaled. Relief flooded through me. I almost lost my balance. “Thank God!” I said. “Can I go and see her . . . please would you just let me inside my own house so I can go and talk to her?”

  “That’s not gonna be possible, I’m afraid,” Lansford said.

  “Not possible? Why would it not be possible?”

  “Because she’s dead, Mr. Vaughan. Your girlfriend is up in your room and she’s dead. It seems someone did some things to her . . . what things the Lord only knows, but someone did some bad things to her and then they damn near cut her in half . . .”

  It was then that everything fell apart.

  I remembered nothing except the grip of the policeman as he tried to hold me up.

  The kitchen.

  Ahead of me a cup filled with strong tea, spoonfuls of sugar stirred into it. Hands shaking too much to lift it, sickened by the sweet smell. I tried to light a cigarette, but couldn’t. Lansford lit it for me, handed it to me. Took a deep drag, inhaled, felt a ru
sh of nausea fill my chest along with the smoke.

  My eyes were beaten red with crying. For a while I was unable to speak, to think, almost to breathe.

  White feathers, that’s what I saw. Small white feathers. On the table, around my feet, there along the draining board, spilling out of the cupboards.

  Everyone was in the back parlor next to the kitchen. Aggie Boyle, Letitia Brock, Emil Janacek and John Franklin. Paul was there too, Ben Godfrey also. I could hear smatterings of words, small punctuations between the rasping breaths coming from my own throat as I tried to gather myself together sufficiently to speak.

  “So you left at what time?” Lansford asked, seemingly for the third or fourth time.

  I heard footsteps upstairs, the boards creaking along the floors hallways. People were up there. Other policemen. A coroner.

  “I left here a little before eight,” I said.

  “To get a bus at eight-fifteen, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Which you didn’t board.”

  “I missed it,” I said. “I missed the bus and had to wait until just after ten.”

  “Ten exactly?”

  “Ten after . . . the second bus left at ten after ten.”

  “And for the two hours between eight-fifteen and ten-ten . . . for those two hours where were you?”

  “Around the bus station, I read for a while, took a walk down the block, had a look in some bookstores.”

  “You could have walked to your appointment. Or you could have come home to wait . . . why didn’t you do that?”

  I shrugged and looked up toward the ceiling again. Nothing to place within any frame of reference. I would close my eyes later, open them, find it was all my imagination. I was still asleep on the bus from Manhattan. I hadn’t even reached Brooklyn. I would shudder. Then I would smile. Then I would start laughing when I realized that my very worst fears were nothing more than some dark outgrowth of a tired and overstretched imagination.

  “I didn’t feel like walking anywhere. I didn’t mind waiting and there didn’t seem to be any point in coming home,” I said. “Bridget would be out for the rest of the day . . .”

  Lansford shook his head. “Apparently not.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Apparently not is what I mean. According to Miss Spragg . . . you know Miss Spragg, right?”

  I nodded.

  “According to Miss Spragg, Bridget McCormack arrived here just before nine a.m. this morning.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand, she said she had something to do with her family.”

  “Which has also been confirmed by Miss Spragg.” Lansford reached into his pocket and took out his notepad. He leafed through a dozen or more pages. “Here,” he said, consulting his own hieroglyphics. “According to Miss Spragg she was leaving for work at St. Joseph’s at about ten minutes before nine. As she reached the hallway Bridget McCormack came in and spoke with her, said that she had been planning to do something with her family that day but it had been postponed so she figured she would come over and spend the day here. She said there were some things she wanted to read, that she would clean up the room a little. Miss Spragg believes that she was referring to your room, Mr. Vaughan. She said that yourself and Bridget McCormack spent most evenings here together, living together if you like?”

  “Yes, you could say that. We spent more time together than we did apart.” I stopped. I looked at Lansford, at the policeman standing by the sink. “This is crazy,” I said. “What the hell is happening here?” I started to rise from the chair. The policeman stepped forward and held my shoulders.

  “And where would you be going, Mr. Vaughan?” Lansford asked, his voice stern.

  “I need to see her,” I said. I felt the swell of emotion again, like a crowd of fists in my chest. Black things swam before my eyes. Feathers. More feathers. Now they were inside my head, right there behind my eyes.

  I thought of angels.

  I thought of my father. How Death had walked along the High Road and taken him. I thought of Gunther Kruger swinging from a barn rafter, a thin pink ribbon wound through the fingers of his right hand.

  I thought of my mother, a child killer herself, of how she had become exactly what she’d tried to prevent.

  I started to sob, a great heaving retch through the middle of my body, and then I swung my arm wide, hit the teacup, sent it spinning across the room, its tepid contents spattering on the linoleum.

  “Get the doctor,” Lansford said. “Get the doctor down here right now!”

  The policeman jumped, released me, and went out of the room. I heard him running up the stairs. I felt Lansford’s hands on my shoulders, holding me right there in the chair. Right there in Aggie Boyle’s kitchen.

  I saw my mother’s face. The mother I remembered, not the one I buried.

  I saw the soles of Virginia Grace Perlman’s shoes just as they’d appeared over the brow of the hill.

  Voices again. A sense of being manhandled awkwardly. And then there was a pin. Sharp pain like a needle in my arm. I fought against it, wrestled violently. But it came like a cloud right through me and there was nothing I could do. I folded silently. Down I went into the darkness.

  It was a long time before I surfaced, and when I did I remembered that my world was gone.

  I woke in a hospital, but no hospital I had ever seen. The walls were white, as was the ceiling, as were the sheets and bedframes. It was a dormitory of sorts, a single door at the far end with bars across the narrow window. When I moved I found that my hands were shackled to the frame, and it was then that reality came. Like a fist. Like a bullet. Like a thundering sound.

  I closed my eyes. I could not bear to open them again. I believed I should die.

  That—in hindsight—would perhaps have been the most merciful thing.

  Hours later—I had no way of determining the time—Lansford came to see me.

  “What’s happening?” I asked him. “Where am I? What the hell am I doing here?”

  Lansford dragged a chair from the wall and sat down next to the bed. In his hand he carried a thin manila folder, which he opened and balanced on his knees. “We had to have you sedated,” he said matter-of-factly. His tone was dry and businesslike. I sensed the pressure of threat. “You lost yourself somewhat,” he added. “Back there in the house. We had to have the doctor come down and sedate you.”

  “Where am I?”

  “Hospital wing,” Lansford said. “Prison.”

  “Prison? What the hell am I doing in prison?” I tried to sit up but the shackles on my wrists held me down.

  “I need some answers. This is not a matter of negotiation. The time of death of the McCormack girl has demonstrated that you had more than ample opportunity to return to the house once you’d missed your bus, to have raped and killed her, and then to have made it back again in time to catch the second bus to Manhattan.”

  “What? What the hell are you talking about? You don’t seriously think—”

  “I’m not done. I’d appreciate if you wouldn’t interrupt me, Mr. Vaughan. As I was saying, taking into consideration the time of death, you had more than enough chance to go back to the house and do this terrible thing, so opportunity is not in question. Method? Well, that seems simple enough. The girl was attacked, and there are indications that she was raped. Seems, at least from the coroner’s initial report, that she was attacked with such violence that her neck was broken as she was pushed against the wall. Subsequently it appears that an attempt was made to actually sever the body in two. So that was method, Mr. Vaughan—”

  My mind was closing down. Images battered me. The sound of screaming, the vision of blood. The thought of Bridget . . . “You’re insane—”

  “Mr. Vaughan!” Lansford barked forcibly. “I asked you once, politely I think, if you would not interrupt me. I’ll ask you again now, and I will be most unhappy if you don’t cooperate. Now, as I was going to say . . . if you understand police investigative procedu
re, you’d know that the first facts that have to be established are threefold. Method, motive, and opportunity. The first and the last are evident, but the middle one, the motive for this brutal attack, has yet to be determined. But we believe that we may have something substantial to consider.”

  I said nothing. A thousand questions filled my mind. My entire body was wracked with anguish, a pain that was more than mental, a pain that drove right through me. I could barely breathe. I realized where this was going. I realized what this police sergeant thought.

  Lansford seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but I was unable to speak.

  “You understand, of course, Mr. Vaughan, that in this democratic system of ours a man is innocent until proven guilty?”

  He paused again. I still could not speak. A multitude of words were there, but not one single sound came forth.

  “So until we can demonstrate someone’s guilt without doubt, we work on the basis that he has every right to defend himself, to seek legal counsel. In your case, Mr. Vaughan, I suggest you attend to this right away. Secure yourself a lawyer, and be prepared for a lengthy interrogation regarding the death of this unfortunate girl. You are, shall we say, somewhat in the line of fire as far as this matter is concerned.”

  Lansford said nothing for a moment, and then he rose from his chair, lifted it and returned it to its place against the wall.

  “I don’t understand what’s happening,” I mumbled. My throat was tight. My head pounded mercilessly. “I don’t see what possible motive I could have had.”

  Lansford smiled, it seemed at first a little sympathetically, and then his face hardened. “The girl,” he said. “This Bridget McCormack, she was pregnant, Mr. Vaughan. Just a few weeks pregnant.”

  I felt every ounce of life I possessed drain from within me.

  “And, well, it is a sorry state of affairs when an unwanted child provokes an act of murder, but the truth is what we see, is it not?”

  Lansford backed up and turned toward the door. When he reached it he turned back to face me. “I will send an orderly to make arrangements for you to call a lawyer. Like I said before, I would recommend that you do this immediately.”