Charisma

by Orania Papazoglou

  “All right.”

  “Call Markham and Halt and tell them to meet me there?”

  “All right again.” A pause. A cough. A paper shuffled. “What about you?” she said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Maybe. But you just got in and you’re going out again.”

  “I’m feeling restless,” he told her.

  “I know that.” Another cough. Another shuffle. Another pause. “Forget I mentioned it,” she said. He heard her nails click against the intercom button as the line went dead.

  Outside, the weather that had been getting better was getting worse again. Pat stood up, put on his jacket, and went to the window to look at it. The sky was jammed shut with clouds again, and big snowflakes were drifting down, round white mats as big as drinks coasters. He ran his hand through his hair. He really was restless. He couldn’t stand the thought of not moving something.

  Andrea was sixty-three and fat as Oliver Hardy, the prototypical secretary of a man with a jealous wife. But he didn’t have a wife. He’d never had one. His brothers and sisters had all gone on to build families like the one they’d come from, but for some reason he’d never been able to connect. Even his lovers never lasted long. Women drifted in and out of his life like cases, rearranged his furniture, then disappeared. He couldn’t remember having wanted one to stay.

  He couldn’t remember what had started him on this train of thought, either. Like the memory of his mother, it had just hit him.

  He zipped his jacket shut and headed for the door. Once he got to work, he would be all right. He told himself to think about Theresa Cavello and Billy Hare.

  What he thought about instead was Dan Murphy’s sister, her black hair and the serious attentiveness of her face, the tense watchful stillness that surrounded her like a halo. Nuns were always like that, and they never stopped being nuns. It got into their skin and stained them.

  Stained them.

  He hated to admit it, but he was burning out.

  2

  The problem with the New Haven morgue was that it wasn’t in a basement. Part of it was. Most of it—the offices, the tech rooms, the computers, and the files—was on a first floor of broad hallways and wide plate-glass windows. It didn’t even have the virtue of being dark. Walking down to Anton Klemmer’s office was like wandering through a particularly peppy grammar school.

  Anton Klemmer didn’t do much for Pat’s prejudices, either. By tradition, he should have been an old man with an immigrant’s accent, puttering around a shade-darkened room and cackling over skulls. In reality, he was young, and very American. His name was a sop his mother had thrown to her husband’s father. It had worked. Anton had grown up on Noble Street in West Haven, gone to a local public school and the University of Connecticut at Storrs. He’d led a perfectly normal life until medical school, when he’d marched into Johns Hopkins without a single loan to his name. His grandfather hadn’t left him much, but he’d left him enough.

  When Pat came in, Anton was sitting in a gray swivel chair, his feet up on his desk, his nose buried in a book whose cover read: Microscopic Spectography in Investigative Analysis. As always when he wasn’t doing an autopsy, he was dressed in part of a three-piece suit. The pants and vest were there, although the vest was unbuttoned and hanging open over his white shirt. The jacket was nowhere in evidence.

  Pat closed the door to the hallway, and Anton closed his book, not bothering to mark his place.

  “My secretary got a call from your secretary,” he said. “We should be in the Fortune 500.”

  “What’s the book for?” Pat asked him.

  Anton shrugged. “They send them to me. They want me to write blurbs. I never write blurbs, but sometimes I read the things.”

  “Is it any good?”

  “The guy who wrote it knows as much about criminal investigation as I do about cooking.” Anton threw the book on the desk. “So, what’s this all about? I gave you everything I had on Billy Hare, but you know how that kind of thing is. Nothing makes any difference.”

  “This isn’t about Billy Hare. I came about Theresa Cavello,” he said. “I got your note.”

  “Ah,” Anton said. “Did you understand my note?”

  “Maybe.” Pat leaned over and took a pen and a piece of paper off Anton’s desk. There were plenty of both. Anton seemed to live in a sea of Southworth and Bic. Pat put the paper on his knee and drew carefully. “She was marked. With this. And you’re upset about it.”

  Pat threw the paper back onto the desk. Anton picked it up and let it flutter in the air. It said this:

  Anton let the paper drop. “Very good,” he said. “Do you want to see the mark?”

  “I’ve seen it,” Pat said.

  “I suppose you would have. You knew her.”

  “I knew her very well. She’d been at Damien House since the place opened.”

  “Yes,” Anton said. “Well. I knew there had to be something. You wouldn’t have asked for information otherwise. Do you know what was strange about this mark?”

  “It’s a Catholic mark,” Pat said. “A Church mark. The symbol for the Eucharist. It’s also the second one we’ve had.”

  “So?” Anton shrugged. “She was a Catholic nun—excuse me, ex-nun—living in a Catholic religious house. Everybody in the neighborhood knew that. As to her being the second one—well, the second of two women who live not a mile from each other and spend their time helping the poor. Find somebody they both knew. On crack.”

  “If you believed that, you wouldn’t have written me that note.”

  “You’re right.” Anton took his feet off the desk. “I’ll tell you what I found strange about this mark. In the first place, it was on her forehead, just about where you’d have put ashes if you were a priest and this was Ash Wednesday.”

  “Not so strange,” Pat said.

  “No, it’s not. But now consider this. First, it was the only mark on her.”

  “I knew that.”

  “And second, it was neat.”

  “What do you mean, neat?”

  “Neat,” Anton insisted. “Have you ever watched a crackhead move? They jerk. They shudder. If they’re high enough they bounce off the ceiling. They don’t carve Eucharistic symbols into nearly live flesh so neatly they could have been making an etching for a lot of Benedictine nuns. Just a minute.” He got out of his chair, went to his files, and pulled out a folder. On his way back to his desk, he dropped the folder in Pat’s lap. “Read that. He used a knife, not a razor blade. We know that from the width of the cuts. But he used the knife well. He didn’t snag the skin. He didn’t tear her. He made perfectly straight lines except for the curve of the P. Then he made a perfectly symmetrical curve. What does that sound like to you?”

  “Psychopath,” Pat said, and then realized with a shock that he hadn’t been expecting it. Even with the McVann death nagging at his memory, he hadn’t been expecting it. When he’d read Anton’s note, he’d thought he was going to get a crime of passion, religious for once instead of sexual. He’d thought he was going to find that one of the people at Damien House had cut her, for reasons that were now obscure but would someday be clear. Now he was being presented with a death that might have had no reason for happening at all.

  The Jug Killer. The Church Street Slasher. Serial killers were every police department’s ultimate nightmare. Pat felt a little sick.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  “Wait,” Anton told him. “You’re going to feel worse. I feel so bad I can hardly look myself in the mirror.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Anton got up again. This time he didn’t bother to walk over to his file cabinet. The folder he needed was right on his desk. He could have reached it sitting down. Apparently he hadn’t wanted to.

  He dropped the folder into Pat’s lap, on top of the one on Theresa Cavello. “That’s the file on Margaret Mary McVann. Her body was found in her apartment over on Dee Street the day before Theresa Cavello died.”
<
br />   “I know.” Pat squirmed. Serial killers had cycles. First there was a long time between each kill, then a shorter time, then a shorter time still. What did they have if this guy was killing one a day?

  Anton reassured him. A little. “She wasn’t killed the day before Theresa Cavello died. She was found. She’d been dead about a week.”

  “That can’t be right, Anton. I’ve seen the file. There wasn’t that kind of mess.”

  “Look at the folder. There was a broken window. Temp down below twenty-five. It was a refrigerator in there.”

  Pat looked. The picture Anton wanted him to see was right on top, probably because Anton had been looking at it himself, frequently. It showed a middle-aged woman with her hair fanned out behind her, lying on a rug. Her neck was broken. Her forehead was marked with the , carved into her flesh as neatly as if it had been stenciled on.

  Pat put both folders back on Anton’s desk and took a deep breath. “Shit,” he said. “Bruises here, no bruises on Terry—what do we have?”

  “Don’t start swearing yet,” Anton said. “You don’t have anything to swear about yet. Wait till you hear the kicker.”

  “What kicker?”

  “We don’t have the body.”

  Pat stared. This is impossible. In a case of violent death, morgues kept bodies for weeks. Sometimes for months. Even with a loving family clamoring around for a chance to hold a funeral, the body should have been kept for seven days.

  “You have to have the body,” he told Anton.

  “We ought to have it,” Anton said, “but we don’t. In fact, we don’t have a number of bodies we ought to have. We had a new girl in processing last weekend.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s supposed to mean she mistook the overtime drawers for the holding drawers and shipped the wrong set out for cremation. By the time anybody knew what had happened, it was Monday morning. All we have are ashes.”

  “Shit,” Pat said again. He wondered if he was getting angry. Listening to Anton this morning had been like taking body blows. He was punchy, and he couldn’t get through that to what he actually felt. God, it was incredible. First life looked like it couldn’t get any worse, and then it did.

  “Shit,” he said for the third time. “Anton—”

  The phone on Anton’s desk rang, tinkling like a bicycle bell. Anton picked it up and waved him quiet.

  “Bitching about it isn’t going to change anything,” he said. “It’s my ass we’re talking about here, not yours.”

  Actually, it was the ass of that new girl in processing, but Pat didn’t say that. He just sank more deeply into his chair and started trying to work it all out. Billy Hare. Theresa Cavello. Margaret Mary Whoever she was. Two big messes, when last week he had had none.

  A moment later, Anton put the receiver on the desk and shoved it across to Pat. He was wincing.

  “It’s for you,” he said.

  Chapter Six

  1

  WHEN PAT PICKED UP the phone, he expected to hear a voice he didn’t know: Markham’s or Halt’s, telling him why they weren’t already at the morgue. Their absence had ticked away at him all the way through his conversation with Anton Klemmer. Andrea had gotten back to him after she’d called down to the pen. They had definitely been there and they had definitely gotten his message. Where were they? Their absence linked up with the processing girl’s stupidity. It was all incompetence and indifference, the way everything else in life was these days. He couldn’t understand it. He remembered his mother cleaning, his father making a high chair in the back bedroom: the tension and seriousness, the undiluted dedication. He’d grown up with people who cared, about everything. He cared about everything. When things got crazy the way they had these last two weeks, he began to take it personally, as guilt. He kept thinking that if he had worked harder, thought smarter, stayed awake longer, none of it would have happened. It was some lack in himself that made violence possible. People like Markham and Halt and the processing girl cared about nothing. They didn’t see themselves responsible for the state of their own teeth. Most of the time they just made him tired. They became part of the nothing-in-particular that was drowning him in exhaustion. Every once in a while, like now, they made him impossibly angry.

  He put the receiver to his ear, telling himself he didn’t know Markham and Halt. They could have been held up by a break in another case. They could have stopped on Chapel Street to prevent a robbery. They could be going to the aid of an officer in trouble, taking a heart attack victim to the hospital, delivering a baby. It wasn’t fair to people to judge them without knowing the facts of their case, and Pat Mallory liked to be fair.

  Still, when he spoke, his “Yes?” had the bite in it that was only there when he was ready to kill somebody. Every officer in Homicide knew it well.

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then a cough and a sigh, and Ben Deaver said, “Pat?”

  “Oh,” Pat said. He literally felt the heat leaving his body, lifting off from his forehead and spinning out into the air. It left a wash of embarrassment behind, because he’d been a jerk. “Sorry. I thought you were somebody else.”

  “I guess,” Ben said. “I almost feel like somebody else. We’ve got another one of the boys.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Pat said. He looked at the ceiling and sighed. “I’m in Anton Klemmer’s office,” he said, although Deaver must have known that. “I’m here on the Cavello thing. What did you want?”

  Deaver took a deep breath, sucking into the phone. “I’m down on Whalen Avenue, down by the theater. You know where that is?”

  “Yes.” Deaver was too young to remember, but there had been a time when the movie theaters on Whalen Avenue were a Mecca for every high-school student in the city. Pat had seen the first four James Bond movies there. He’d even seen the first re-release of Gone with the Wind, with a girl from Saint Mary’s he was hoping to talk into necking with him.

  “I’m in a phone booth about a block west of the theater,” Deaver said. “About a block north of here there’s a vacant lot. Can you find it?”

  “Of course I can find it. If you’re there the place has to be full of cops. Anyone could find it.”

  “The place is full of cops,” Deaver said. “I’ve done as much damage control as I can—”

  “Damage control?”

  “Keeping the techs away from the scene. It would be easier if Dbro wasn’t here. Every time I tell them to pack up and wait, he tells them to unpack and work. Can you get down here right away?”

  “Ben, for Christ’s sake—”

  Anton Klemmer had a crystal paperweight on his desk, made in the shape of a round cut diamond. Without realizing it, Pat had picked it up in his free hand. Now he put it down again, carefully, as if he were afraid he was going to break it.

  “Do you have anybody there besides cops and techs?”

  “Some civilians standing on the sidewalks, trying to figure out what’s going on. That’s it. So far.”

  “All right.”

  “I’ve got to go back and make sure Dbro isn’t making mud pies in the middle of the mess. Get down here right away, all right?”

  Pat started to say “All right” himself, but Deaver had hung up. He stared at the receiver for a moment and then put it back in its cradle.

  On the other side of the desk, Anton Klemmer sat with his arms folded over his chest, his head cocked. “Bad news?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Pat said.

  “What do I do with your two detectives, if they ever get here?”

  Pat was already reaching for his jacket, trying to remember if he’d brought along a pair of gloves. He had a vague memory of very bad weather waiting for him on the outside, terrible weather he had to protect himself against. His incipient burn-out seemed to be in full gear. He felt like his head was stuffed with cotton candy.

  “Get them to do a back search,” he told Anton Klemmer. “When you’ve got them safely into the cold room, stuf
f them in a drawer and lock them up.”

  2

  Because he had been in a hurry, Pat Mallory had come down to the morgue alone. Coming out, he knew he ought to call for an official car and a driver to take him to Ben Deaver. That was the way things were done. It was incredible how many people got crazy when you skirted protocol, as if not wanting to be driven around like a kid too young for a license was an insult to all the people in the Department who wouldn’t mind a bit. Even the uniforms sometimes took it that way. Either that, or they hated you for what they thought was your attempt to play Good Buddy.

  Dbro was going to hate it if he showed up on the bus, but he didn’t care about Dbro. Deaver wouldn’t even notice. Besides, Pat was antsy. The shock-feeling had worn off, and he was already thinking of the dragging feeling as “his burn-out,” the way another man might think of “his marriage.” There was a lot of adrenaline left in him yet. He wasn’t panicking, but he thought he could, if he let himself. What was going on here was an avalanche. There was too much of it, coming too fast, flowing over his head in soft cold waves that threatened to suffocate him.

  There was a bus stop two blocks from the morgue’s front door, and he caught a northbound there, wedging himself into a seat between a young girl with her arms full of packages from Macy’s and an old man who smelled of muscatel. The old man’s jacket had been torn nearly in strips. It hung down from his shoulders like a fringe. Pat watched the other passengers watching him: a black woman with a choir robe over one arm and a Bible in her hands; a black man in a good suit with a briefcase between his feet; a college boy in a Harvard sweatshirt and a pair of Maine hunting boots pretending to read a textbook on sociology. They were all sitting very still, as if any movement on their part would flip the old man’s switch and turn him into a bellowing maniac with a taste for human blood.

  The northbound had a long way to go. By the time it got halfway to Pat’s stop, the old man was the only other passenger on it, and he had fallen asleep. Pat got up and went to sit behind the driver. By law, that seat was a handicapped space, extrawide to accommodate wheelchairs and walkers and canes. He stretched out his legs and looked through the oversize windows at a city that was rapidly dwindling into rubble. Small streets full of smaller houses that, farther south, had been brightly painted and well kept up were, here, small streets with smaller houses in decay. Then the houses stopped and he was surrounded by blank brown brick buildings that could have contained anything, or nothing. New Haven was getting to be like New York: a place where turning the corner was a kind of teleportation.