by Nora Roberts
“Where is he?”
“Oh, in God’s light, I’m sure.” He picked up a handful of nuts. “He died a couple of years ago. Bless you, child,” Logan said when his beer was in front of him. “Now old Frank wasn’t a raving fanatic, he simply wasn’t flexible. Today we have a lot of young priests who question and search, who debate such horny—you should forgive the pun—issues as celibacy and a woman’s right to give the sacraments. It was easier for Frank Moore, who saw things in black and white. A man of the cloth doesn’t lust for wine, women, or silk underwear. Cheers.” He lifted his glass and drained what was left of the beer. “I’m telling you this because I thought I might tug on a few connections, talk to some people who would remember Frank and some of the students under him. I did some counseling at the seminary myself, but that was nearly ten years ago.”
“We’ll take what we can get.”
“Good. Now that that’s settled, I think I’ll have another beer.” He caught the waitress’s eye, then turned back to smile at Ben. “How many years of Catholic school?”
Ben dug for his cigarettes. “Twelve.”
“The whole route. I’m sure the good sisters gave you an admirable foundation.”
“And a few good shots across the knuckles.”
“Yes, bless them. They aren’t all Ingrid Bergmans.”
“No.”
“I don’t have much in common with Pat O’Brien myself.” Logan hefted his fresh beer. “Of course, we’re both Irish. Lecheim.”
“Father Logan—Tim,” Ed quickly corrected. “Can I ask you a religious question?”
“If you must.”
“If this guy, any guy, came to you in the confessional and told you he’d done someone, murdered someone, would you turn him in?”
“That’s a question I can answer equally as a psychiatrist and as a priest. There aren’t many.” He studied his beer a moment. There were times when Logan’s superiors considered him too flexible, but his faith in God and in his fellow man was unwavering. “If someone who had committed a crime came to me in the confessional, or sought my professional help, I would do my best to persuade him to turn himself in.”
“But you wouldn’t push the button?” Ben persisted.
“If someone came to me as a doctor, or seeking absolution, they’d be looking for help. I’d see that they got it. Psychiatry and religion don’t always see eye to eye. In this case they do.”
There was nothing Ed liked better than a problem with more than one solution. “If they don’t see eye to eye, how can you do both?”
“By struggling to understand the soul and the mind—in many ways, seeing them as one and the same. You know, as a priest I could argue the subject of creation for hours, I could give you viable reasons why Genesis stands solid as a rock. As a scientist I could do precisely the same thing with evolution and explain why Genesis is a beautiful fairy tale. As a man I could sit here and say, what the hell difference does it make, we’re here.”
“Which do you believe?” Ben asked him. He preferred one solution, one answer. The right answer.
“That depends, in a matter of speaking, on what suit I’m wearing.” He took a long drink and realized if he had a third beer, he’d be pleasantly buzzed. While enjoying the second, he began to look forward to the third. “Unlike what old Francis Moore used to teach, there are no blacks and whites, Ben, not in Catholicism, not in psychiatry, and certainly not in life. Did God create us out of his goodness and generosity, and perhaps a sense of the ridiculous? Or did we invent God because we have a desperate, innate need to believe in something larger, more powerful, than ourselves? I argue with myself often.” He signaled for another round.
“None of the priests I knew ever questioned the order of things.” Ben swallowed the rest of his vodka. “It was right or it was wrong. Usually it was wrong and you had to pay for it.”
“Sin in its infinite variety. The Ten Commandments were very clear. Thou shalt not kill. Yet we’ve been warriors since before we could speak. The Church doesn’t condemn the soldier who defends his country.”
Ben thought of Josh. Josh had condemned himself. “To kill one-to-one is a sin. To drop a bomb, with an American flag on it, on a village, is patriotic.”
“We are ridiculous creatures, aren’t we?” Logan said comfortably. “Let me use a more simplistic example of interpretation. I had a young student a couple of years ago, a bright young woman who, I’m embarrassed to say, knew her Bible better than I could ever hope to. She came to me one day on the question of masturbation.” He turned a little in his chair and jogged the waitress’s elbow. “Excuse me, dear.” He turned back. “She had a quote, I’m sure I won’t get it quite right, but it had to do with it being better that a man cast his seed into the belly of a whore than to spill it onto the ground. A pretty strong stand, one might say, against, ah, self-servicing.”
“Mary Magdalene was a whore,” Ed mumbled as the booze began to catch up with him.
“So she was.” Logan beamed at him. “In any case, my student’s point was that the female has no seed to cast anywhere or to spill on the ground. Therefore, it must only be a sin to masturbate if you’re a male.”
Ben remembered a couple of sweaty, terrifying sessions during puberty. “I had to say the whole damn rosary,” he muttered.
“I had to say it twice,” Logan put in, and for the first time saw Ben relax with a grin.
“What did you tell her?” Ed wanted to know.
“I told her the Bible often speaks in generalities, that she should search her conscience. Then I looked up the quote myself.” He took a comfortable drink. “Damned if I didn’t think she had a point.”
Chapter 10
The Greenbriar Art Gallery was a small, fussy pair of rooms near the Potomac that stayed in business because people always buy the ridiculous if the price tag is high enough.
It was run by a crafty little man who rented the ramshackle building for a song and promoted his eccentric reputation by painting the outside puce. He favored long, unstructured jackets in rainbow hues, with half boots to match, and he smoked pastel cigarettes. He had an odd, moon-shaped face and pale eyes that tended to flutter when he spoke of the freedom and expression of art. He tucked his profits tidily away in municipal bonds.
Magda P. Carlyse was an artist who became trendy when a former first lady had purchased one of her sculptures as a wedding present for the daughter of a friend. A few art critics had suggested that the first lady must not be too fond of the newlyweds, but Magda’s career had been launched.
Her showing at the Greenbriar Gallery was a huge success. People crammed into the room dressed in furs, denim, spandex, and silks. Cappuccino was served in thimble-sized cups, along with mushroom quiches the size of quarters. A seven-foot black man wrapped in a purple cloak stood mesmerized by a sculpture of sheet metal and feathers.
Tess took a long look at it herself. It made her think of the hood of a truck that had passed through a migration of unfortunate geese.
“A fascinating combination of mediums, isn’t it?”
Tess rubbed a finger over her bottom lip before she glanced up at her date. “Oh, absolutely.”
“Powerfully symbolic.”
“Frightening,” she agreed, and lifted her cup to disguise a giggle. She’d heard of Greenbriar, of course, but had never found the time or the energy to explore this trendy little gallery. Tonight she was grateful for the distraction this gathering provided. “You know, Dean, I’m really delighted you thought of this. I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting my interest in popular, ah, art.”
“Your grandfather tells me you’ve been working too hard.”
“Grandpa worries too much.” She turned away to study a two-foot phallic tube that strained toward the ceiling. “But an evening here certainly takes your mind off everything else.”
“Such emotion, such insight,” a man in yellow silk bubbled to a woman in sable. “As you can see, the use of the broken light bulb symbolizes the destructio
n of ideas in a society that is driven toward a desert of uniformity.” Tess shifted away as the man gestured dramatically with his cigarette then glanced at the sculpture he raved about.
It had a G.E. seventy-five-watt bulb with a jagged hole just off center. The bulb was screwed into a plain wooden base of white pine. That was it, except for the fact that the little blue sticker indicated it had been sold. The price had been twelve hundred seventy-five dollars.
“Amazing,” Tess murmured, and was rewarded by a generous beam from Mr. Yellow Silk.
“It is quite innovative, isn’t it?” Dean smiled down at the bulb as if he’d created it himself. “And daringly pessimistic.”
“Words escape me.”
“I know just what you mean. The first time I saw it, I was struck dumb.”
Deciding against making the obvious comment, Tess merely smiled and moved on. She could do a paper, she thought, on the psychological implications—mass hysteria—that prompted people to actually pay for esoteric junk. She stopped by a glass square that had been filled with various size and color buttons. Square, round, enameled, and cloth covered, they huddled and bumped together in the sealed box. The artist had called it “Population, 2010.” Tess figured a Girl Scout could have put it together in about three and a half hours. The price tag read a whopping seventeen hundred fifty.
With a shake of her head she started to turn back to her date, when she saw Ben. He was standing by another display, his hands in his back pockets and a look of unconcealed amusement on his face. His jacket was open. Under it he wore a plain gray sweatshirt and jeans. A woman in five-thousand-dollars worth of diamonds swept up beside him to study the same piece of sculpture. Tess saw him mumble something under his breath just before he glanced up and saw her.
They stared as people passed between them. The woman in diamonds blocked the way for a moment, but when she walked on, neither of them had moved. Tess felt something loosen inside her, then grow tight and uncomfortable again before she made herself smile at him and nod in a friendly, casual greeting.
“… don’t you agree?”
“What?” She jerked herself back to Dean. “I’m sorry, my mind was wandering.”
A man who lectured hundreds of college students a year was used to being ignored. “I said, don’t you think this particular sculpture shows the true conflict and eternal cycle of the man-woman relationship?”
“Hmmm.” What she saw was a jangle of copper and tin that may or may not have been welded into metallic copulation.
“I’m thinking of buying it for my office.”
“Oh.” He was a sweet and absolutely harmless English professor whose uncle played an occasional game of poker with her grandfather. Tess felt an obligation to lead him away from the sculpture, as a mother might lead a child whose allowance was hot in his hand away from a shelf of plastic, overpriced model cars. “Don’t you think you should look around a bit, consider some of the other …” What did one call them? “Pieces first?”
“The stuff’s selling like hotcakes. I don’t want to miss out.” He glanced around the sardine-packed room then began to edge toward the owner. Greenbriar was hard to miss in an electric-blue suit with headband to match. “Excuse me, just a minute.”
“Hello, Tess.”
Cautious, calm, she looked up at Ben. The fingers around the minuscule handle of her cup dampened. Tess told herself it was the body heat in the overcrowded room.
“Hello, Ben. How are you?”
“Terrific.” He was lousy, had been lousy for exactly one week. She stood in the midst of what he considered the pomp and the pompous and looked as cool and virginal as a vase of violets among a forest of orchids. “Interesting gathering.”
“At least.” Then her gaze slid over to the woman at his side.
“Dr. Court, Trixie Lawrence.”
Trixie was an Amazon in red leather. In heeled boots, she stood an inch over Ben, with a mane of improbable red hair that exploded around her head in spikes, corkscrews, and kinks. The army of bracelets on her arm jingled as she shifted. On her left breast was a tattoo of a rose that peeked out from the low V of her vest.
“Hello.” Tess smiled and offered her hand.
“Hi. So you’re a doctor?” For all her size, Trixie’s voice was only a breathless squeak.
“I’m a psychiatrist.”
“No shit?”
“No shit,” Tess agreed as Ben made a business of clearing his throat.
Trixie took one of the quarter-sized quiches and swallowed it like an aspirin. “I had a cousin in the loony bin once. Ken Launderman. Maybe you know him.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Yeah, I guess you see a lot of people with their batteries low.”
“More or less,” Tess murmured, and glanced over at Ben. No trace of embarrassment there, she noted. He was grinning like a fool. Her own lips twitched before she lifted her cup. “I’m surprised to see you here.”
Ben rocked back on the heels of worn tennis shoes. “Just impulse. I busted Greenbriar about seven years ago. Little artistic business with checks. When he sent me the invitation, I thought I’d drop in and find out how he was doing.” He glanced over to see his host embrace the woman in diamonds. “Seems to be doing just fine.”
Tess tasted her cooling cappuccino and wondered if Ben kept on such friendly relations with everyone he’d arrested. “So, what do you think of the show?”
Ben looked over at the case of buttons. “Such blatant mediocrity, in a society that has singles’ night at the supermarket, is bound to be rewarded with tremendous financial gain.” He watched the light bloom in her eyes, wishing he could touch her. Just once. Just for a moment.
“That’s what makes America great.”
“You look terrific, Doc.” He yearned. It was the first time he believed he understood the true meaning of the word.
“Thanks.” With the clear-minded intensity she hadn’t felt since childhood, she wished she looked terrific.
“I’ve never been to singles’ night at the supermarket,” Trixie put in as she inhaled a plateful of quiches.
“You’ll love it.” Ben’s smile faded a bit when he looked over Tess’s shoulder and saw the man she’d been standing with before. “Friend of yours?”
Tess turned her head, then waited until Dean worked his way through the crowd. Her neck was long, slender, circled by pearls that made her skin seem only more delicate. Ben could smell her cool, quietly sexual scent over everything else.
“Dean, I’d like you to meet Ben Paris and Trixie Lawrence. Ben’s a detective with the local police.”
“Ah, one of the city’s finest.” Dean gave him a hearty handshake.
The guy looked like a cover of Gentlemen’s Quarterly and smelled like a Brut commercial. Ben had an irrational urge to grip his hand Indian-wrestle style and go a round. “You one of Tess’s colleagues?”
“No, actually I’m on the staff at American University.”
College professor. It figured. Ben stuck his hands in his pockets again and took a small, telling step away from Tess. “Well, Trix and I just walked in. We haven’t had a chance to absorb yet.”
“It’s almost too much to take in in one evening.” Dean cast a proprietary eye at the mangle of copper beside him. “I’ve just bought this piece. It’s a bit risqué for my office, but I couldn’t resist.”
“Yeah?” Ben looked at it, then stuck his tongue in his cheek. “You must be thrilled. I’m going to stroll around and see if I can pick up something for my den. Nice meeting you.” He slipped an arm around Trixie’s sturdy waist. “See you, Doc.”
“Good night, Ben.”
It was still shy of eleven when Tess stepped into her apartment alone. The headache she’d used as an excuse to cut the evening short had only been half a lie. Normally she enjoyed her occasional dates with Dean. He was an undemanding, uncomplicated man, the kind of man she deliberately dated in order to keep her personal life equally undemanding and uncomplicated.
But tonight she just hadn’t been able to face a late supper and discussion of nineteenth-century literature. Not after the art gallery.
Not after seeing Ben, she made herself admit, and slipped out of her shoes two feet inside the door. Whatever progress she’d made in soothing her ego and alleviating the tension since that last morning she’d seen him had been blown, quite simply, to smithereens.
So she’d start from scratch. A hot cup of tea. She took off her fur jacket and hung it in the hall closet. She’d spend the evening in bed with Kurt Vonnegut, camomile, and Beethoven. The combination would take anyone’s mind off their problems.
What problems? she asked herself as she stood listening to the quiet of the apartment she came home to night after night. She had no real problems because she’d made certain she wouldn’t. A nice apartment in a good neighborhood, a dependable car, a light and consistently casual social life. That was precisely how she’d planned things.
She’d taken step A, and made certain it led to step B, and so on until she’d reached the plateau that satisfied her. She was satisfied.
She took off her earrings and dropped them on the dining room table. The sound of stone hitting wood echoed dully in the empty room. The mums she’d bought earlier in the week were beginning to go. Bronzed petals lay fading against the polished mahogany. Absently Tess picked them up. Their scent, sharp and spicy, went with her to the bedroom.
She wouldn’t look at the files on her desk tonight, she told herself as she pulled down the zipper of her ivory wool dress. If she had a problem, it was that she didn’t allow herself enough time. Tonight she would pamper herself, forget about the patients who would come to her office on Monday morning, forget about the clinic where she would have to face the anger and resentment of drug withdrawal two afternoons next week. She’d forget about the murder of four women. And she’d forget about Ben.
In the full-length mirror inside the closet, her reflection leaped out at her. She saw a woman of average height, slim build, in an expensive and conservatively cut ivory wool dress. A choker of three strands of pearls and a fat amethyst lay against her throat. Her hair was caught back at the temples with pearl-trimmed ivory combs. The set had been her mother’s, and as quietly elegant as the senator’s daughter had been.