Charisma

by Orania Papazoglou

  It was a train of thought so intrinsically embarrassing, it made Susan incapable of looking Father Burne in the face. She stared into her coffee and missed the quick sharp shake of his head, the decisive gesture of recognition, with which he ended his examination of her. She had the feeling he was staring at her, but she didn’t look up.

  After a while he said, “It’s Susan Murphy, isn’t it? Dan and Andy Murphy’s sister. You were here the other day.”

  Now Susan did look up. She felt she had to. She was a little startled to see that Father Tom had taken the seat across from her, and somehow acquired a cup of coffee of his own. Had she really been avoiding any notice of him for that long?

  She took another drag on her cigarette, put it quickly down into the ashtray, and said, “Yes, yes, that’s who I am. I was here the other day. I mean—”

  “You were curious the other day.”

  “Something like that.”

  “A lot of people are curious.” Father Tom shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder what they’re curious about. It’s not as if this place is exotic.”

  “It is where I come from.”

  “Where you come from,” Father Tom repeated. “What did somebody tell me? Maybe it was you who told me. Immaculate Heart of Mary nuns?”

  “That’s right.”

  “They used to have beautiful habits. Blue. I remember them from when I was first out of the seminary. No wimple cape to clutter up the line.”

  “We gave them up a long time ago. IHM out in Montecito gave them up in sixty-eight or sixty-nine.”

  “You weren’t at Montecito?”

  “Hobb’s Point,” Susan said. “We never completely gave up habit at all.”

  “Were your modified habits blue?”

  “Yes.”

  Father Tom nodded. “That’s good. I’m always telling the sisters around here, and the ex-sisters, giving up the habit was the stupidest thing the nuns ever did. Bad for recruiting. Bad for the public image. Bad for everything, really. Nuns in makeup, Why did you come out?”

  “What?”

  “Why did you come out?” Father Tom insisted. “You must have had a reason. You were in for—what?”

  “Seventeen years.”

  “Seventeen years is a lifetime. You don’t walk out on that for no reason at all. Are you one of those women who won’t be happy unless the Pope lets you be ordained?”

  Susan had never given a thought to female ordination—she’d had much more basic things to think about—but for some reason this comment irritated her. It was as if Father Tom Burne thought of women in favor of ordination as a different kind of animal, not-human, not-Catholic. She had half a mind to tell him that yes, she wanted to be ordained, even though the very thought of it appalled her. Being a nun had been bad enough.

  She saw that her cigarette had gone out and lit another one. She saw that half her coffee remained undrunk and took a sip. The real problem, she decided, was that this felt like some kind of test.

  “I think,” she told him, “that the real problem is that I walked in on it for no reason at all.”

  “None?”

  “Let’s just say that, back in my senior year in high school, it seemed like a good idea. I’m still not entirely sure why.”

  “That was something else that was a mistake,” Father Tom said. “Asking the girls to wait a year after high school before they entered. Giving them just enough time to be corrupted by the world, and not want to enter at all.”

  “You don’t believe in mature vocations?”

  “I don’t believe in maturity at all. Maturity is another name for carefulness. There’s nothing careful about heeding the call of God.”

  “There’s a mouse up there in the third-floor dormitory and the girls have turned it into a pet,” Marietta O’Brien said, coming through the door like a bad wind. “They’ve tied a ribbon around its neck and made a nest for it in a bureau drawer. If they hadn’t left me a present this morning, I’d have murdered them all in their sleep.”

  “What kind of present?” Father Tom asked.

  Marietta put her hand in the pocket of her dress—changing out of the robe must have been one of the things she was doing upstairs, besides finding mice in bureau drawers—and came out with an amber rosary with hard clear beads that glittered even in the dimness of the kitchen light. I’ve seen a rosary like that, Susan thought, but the memory was unclear and she couldn’t get hold of it.

  Father Tom was turning the rosary over in his hands, frowning at it. “Where did you get it?” he asked her. “Who gave it to you?”

  “It was on my pillow when I went up to change. One of the girls must have left it. That’s the only way it could have gotten in there. I must say it was a nice sight to see. It’s amazing, the way people stop giving you religious things when you stop being a nun. Even though religious things are what you need most.”

  “Where were you a nun?” Susan asked her.

  “Sacred Heart,” Marietta said. “If you can believe that. Me, and all those girls from the best Catholic families.”

  5

  Later, Susan would wonder what had kept her from leaving then—when the house was waking up, when she was in the way, when she was invisible. People kept coming in and out of the kitchen, getting cereal they ate standing up at the sink, crossing themselves with the holy water that was kept in a little basin just under the crucifix on the west wall. People drank half-cups of coffee and left them on the counters for Marietta to clean up. Small children—too small, Susan thought, to ever have been wandering around alone on the streets—were relieved of the coffee they tried to sneak into their milk glasses and provided with the milk instead. Men and women, girls and boys, religious and clergy and lay people all seemed to be jumbled up together, without “defined roles” or “distinct lines of authority,” the way her social work course had insisted that all work with “people in need” ought to be. The scene would have reminded her of breakfast in an old-fashioned “fine Catholic family” if the conversation hadn’t been so off-handedly and unself-consciously bizarre.

  “Jenny McCormick ended up in detox out in Orange,” somebody said. “She had a baby and it was all screwed up, so the welfare people just knew she was on crack, and you know what that means.”

  “Jenny McCormick won’t last fifteen minutes with the welfare people,” someone else said. “The last time they tried to mess around with her, she bit one.”

  “This time they’ve got a commitment order and they’re going to lock her up,” the first someone said. “I figure she’ll end up dead in about a year. You know what those people are like.”

  “I know better than you do,” the second someone said. “I was actually in one, when I got pregnant. The first time I ever got fucked, it was by my foster father, and he told the frigging social worker I’d been porking half of West Haven, and you know who they believed.”

  “Didn’t Jenny McCormick just have a birthday?” a third someone said. “Her pimp gave her a party down in the Congo and I think she was fourteen.”

  “Why don’t they like the welfare people?” Susan asked, but nobody answered her. Nobody even heard her. She was not only invisible, but functionally mute. Besides, nobody was really talking to anybody, in the ordinary sense of the phrase. They were simply passing information back and forth, like batons in a relay race.

  “Jerry Kevchek’s disappeared again. Tony Buto says he thinks he’s dead because he got picked up by a john one night and then he just wasn’t around anymore.”

  “Donna Brendan’s back on the street. She went home to live with her mother but her mother’s a drunk and it didn’t work out.”

  “Barney brought in these two little kids last night, look less than five years old, he found them wandering around outside and now he can’t get them to talk. You try to get near them and they just burst into tears and won’t say anything at all.”

  “Does Barney know if they can say anything at all? I mean, with little kids, sometimes if their parents
are on dope, they don’t learn to talk too good.”

  “They learn to talk by the time they’re five, for God’s sake.”

  “Don’t bet on it. Steve brought in one a couple of years ago who was nearly eight and he looked four and he couldn’t say a word. I mean, nobody had ever talked to him before.”

  After a while, Susan got up, stationed herself at the sink, and started to wash dishes. Marietta got used to the new arrangement in no time at all and started to hand the dishes over, from counters and tabletops and even chairs, wherever they got put down in the mad rush to Susan didn’t know where, or what. It almost didn’t matter. She was moving by then just to keep from vomiting. The conversation was bypassing her brain and going straight to her gut, making it roll. Her eyes were stinging and her vision was blurred and she couldn’t find the spigot when she needed it.

  She was just beginning to think she would have to get out of there after all—she would have to do something, because one more of those overheard conversations and she would collapse—when she felt someone standing much too close to her and looked up to see Father Tom Burne, leaning against the sink at her side. He had an odd look on his face, one she didn’t like, but she didn’t have the mental strength to analyze it. She just turned away from him and plunged a dish streaked with grape jelly into the water next to her hand.

  A moment later, Father Tom tapped her gently on the shoulder, and she made herself turn. He looked resigned and exasperated, and Susan got the feeling that he had been counting on the reality of this place to drive her away. Now that it hadn’t, he seemed to feel stuck with her.

  “Come with me to my office,” he said. “We’ll have a nice long talk about the fact that I am me, Damien House is Damien House, and your brother is that paragon of Catholic laymen, the great Daniel Murphy.”

  Chapter Two

  1

  WHEN THE CALL CAME in on Ellen Burnett, early on the morning of December 16, Pat Mallory answered it. He had to, because he’d told everyone from the chief of police to the clerk typist supervisor in Homicide that he wanted to be in at the scene of any crime that looked like it had ties to the murders of Theresa Cavello and Margaret Mary McVann. Giving that kind of direction was always dangerous—you got called out on dozens of things that had nothing to do with anything whatsoever—and Pat felt as if he’d spent too much time burning rubber from one end of the New Haven city limits to the other, screeching to stops in front of brick walls that could have mashed him into hamburger, leaping out of cars onto ice so slick it threatened to toss him even in hob boots, and all for nothing. It was playing cops and robbers, and Pat didn’t like it.

  Still, Ellen Burnett was for real, and that made things better—for a while. At least it made Pat feel less like an idiot with an obsession. He wasn’t imagining things. There really was a nut out there, and the nut was good—always a nerve-wrecking sign. In spite of all the true-crime books that cluttered up the bookstore on Chapel Street where he bought his monthly copy of The Atlantic, Pat knew psychopaths were not often good at what they did. They were almost never any good at getting away with it. Some of them were schizos, pure and simple. They heard voices in their heads or had visions in their breakfast cereal. Those were the easiest to catch, because they weren’t operating in Real Time. If they managed to rack up a victim or two, it was mostly by accident. If they didn’t get hauled in after their first crime, it was mostly the stranger factor. It was always harder to find a murderer who had no sane connection to his victim than to find one who had—but with the schizos it was a toss-up, really, whether they started by offing innocent bystanders or doing away with their own families. Pat always thought of the schizos as heroes of chance.

  As for the others, the minority, they were something else again. Getting out of his car in the alley behind Arlie’s Restaurant, Pat was thinking about them, because the murder of Theresa Cavello had been so damned neat. Schizos had no time to be neat, and junkies had no interest—in the past five years or so, with the coming of crack, they’d had a number of what looked like serial murder cases that turned out to be junkie hits.

  He had stuffed his gloves into his pockets when he’d gotten into the car—he hated having to drive with them on—and he got them out. It was bitterly cold and windy, with ice rimming the garbage cans someone had put across the alley access to the diner’s back patch. The problem with the killer of Margaret Mary McVann and Theresa Cavello was that he didn’t add up. The Eucharistic symbol pointed to a schizo. So did the bruises on Margaret Mary’s body. But there were no bruises on Theresa’s body, and the cuts were so damn neat, so precise, so carefully calculated. Sometimes Pat wondered about the weather. Theresa had been left inside, but in a place she had to be quickly found. Margaret Mary had also been left inside, but in a place where she was not likely to be quickly found—had the broken window been accidental or deliberate? There was no way to tell, but Pat kept thinking that if that window had not been open, the cut on Margaret Mary’s forehead would not have survived well enough for them to identify it.

  He edged by the garbage cans and into the small open area that led to the diner’s back door, to find Ben Deaver standing beside a tall, thin man in a cashmere coat and a J. Press three-piece suit, looking pained. The tall, thin man looked intolerably smug. Pat got the impression that his coat was open mostly for display. The tall, thin man wanted them all to know he could buy his suits at J. Press; and to see the square black Burberry label every time the wind made the edges of his coat flap. Pat caught Ben Deaver’s eye and raised a single eyebrow. Ben Deaver shrugged.

  There were crowds of technical people stuffed into every nook and cranny in the back patch, photographers setting off flashbulbs in quick bursts that looked like machine-gun fire, bag men picking up scraps from the ground with tweezers, even a man with a sterile vacuum. Pat walked over to the body and looked down at it. It had been propped carefully against a garbage can, sitting up, the Eucharistic symbol etched clearly and precisely into its forehead. Since everybody on the New Haven police force, in Homicide or out, knew better than to move the body before Pat got to it, Pat could only assume the killer had left it this way—which was bizarre. The other two had been left where they fell, moved only as much as had been necessary to cut them. Pat had seen the body of Theresa Cavello. He had read the report on Margaret Mary McVann: “victim found on carpet, head up.” He had also seen the pictures.

  He stood over the body for a moment, checked out the scene—more garbage pails, cleaner looking, not as often used; pieces of packing crates; wads of filthy frozen fabric that might once have been aprons or tablecloths. The body was not only sitting upright but wedged into all this, so it didn’t look slumped. It was impossible to know if that had been the effect intended.

  Pat turned away and walked back across the patch toward Ben Deaver and the tall, thin man. The tall, thin man was looking blue around the lips. Pat stopped next to Ben Deaver and said, “Well?”

  Deaver looked at the tall, thin man and said, “This is Dr. James MacLure. He’s a psychologist.”

  “Psychiatrist,” Dr. James MacLure said.

  “Exactly why,” Pat asked them, “do we have a psychiatrist at the crime scene? Especially a psychiatrist who’s not a police psychiatrist?”

  “The police department doesn’t have psychiatrists,” Dr. James MacLure said. “They only have psychologists.”

  “It’s an inferior grade of witch doctor,” Ben Deaver said.

  Dr. James MacLure had his hands in his pockets. He shoved them even more deeply in and frowned. The blue around his lips was now tinged with red. He was, Pat thought, a man who had a hard time controlling his anger.

  “I,” Dr. MacLure said, “am a specialist consultant in violent manias at the Yale New Haven Medical Center. I was dragged down here, out of a perfectly sound sleep, by Daniel Murphy himself—”

  “He sent a car,” Ben Deaver said blandly.

  “Of course he sent a car,” Dr. MacLure said. “I live in Orange, for
God’s sake. Dan was in a hurry. He should have been in a hurry. You’ve got a psychopath on your hands.”

  “Sociopath,” Pat said automatically. Then he saw that the man with the sterile vacuum had backed away from the scene and the photographers had gone with him. They were clearing a path for the ambulance men who had been waiting unobtrusively at the far end of the alley. He backed away a little himself and then grabbed Ben Deaver by the arm.

  “Come on,” he said.

  Dr. James MacLure looked startled and infinitely offended. “I don’t have the time to stand around here in the cold getting nothing done,” he said. “I have a practice. What do you think I do with my time?”

  Pat had a hundred answers to that, but not one of them was politic, at least as long as he wasn’t winning. He muttered a perfunctory “Excuse me,” kept his hand on Ben Deaver’s arm, and started moving up the alley to where he’d parked his car.

  2

  Once he had Ben Deaver in the car, with the doors closed and the windows up and the motor running so the heat could pump, Pat felt he could relax, at least a little. With the coming of the ambulance men the scene had gone crazy. There was no longer any need for extraordinary caution, and people—professionals and amateurs both—had begun milling around aimlessly, giving in to their need for gossip and their rattling nerves. Pat saw a bag lady materialize out of nowhere and take a seat in a pile of garbage at the very edge of the alley. He wondered what she expected to find when the crowd dispersed.

  It wasn’t the kind of thing that bore thinking about. He turned to Ben Deaver and said, “Well? What was all that about?”