Charisma

  4

  Upstairs, Susan Murphy came out of the elevator with both trays still perfectly poised on her left arm, put them down on the coffee table without spilling, and said, “I won’t make you eat all of it, but I may make you eat half of it.”

  She was so charged up by her run to the cafeteria, she had noticed nothing except for the fact that Denny’s mother was still in the waiting room and still pressed against the plate glass. She had certainly not noticed that the cop shift had changed, or that the cop who was standing in front of her now was recognizable to her as a cop only because she knew him.

  “What the hell,” Pat Mallory asked her, “are you doing here?”

  Chapter Five

  1

  IN THE BEGINNING, HE had not been worried about when they found the bodies. Once he had killed them they were out of his hands—consigned to God, as Sister Mathilde would have said—and he had felt that there was something wrong with taking an interest in what would happen to them next. Now, it was different. He was so very close to the end, but the end couldn’t come unless all the bodies had been found first. His charism was more than a gift from the Holy Spirit. It was a work of art, with parameters and brush strokes and a source of light. It started with Susan Murphy and it ended with her—because she was his sister, his link with the evil that caused the pain. In the middle there were examples and expositions, necessary judgments. If they had all been found together, or at once, there would have been a manhunt, too much publicity, too much danger. If they weren’t found at all, nobody would know what he was doing. It was necessary in the long run, that everybody know what he was doing.

  He had just come from The Apartment—or, to be exact, from a hole in the ceiling of The Apartment, accessed from a hole in the floor of the empty apartment above—and he was finding it hard to walk. Even now, free of them all, on his own and untouchable, he was never entirely free when he went to The Apartment. He had to be careful not to give himself away, which meant he had to be careful not to move. He had only a small slit in the ceiling cover to look through, which meant he had to hold his eye steadily against it or miss seeing what he’d gone to see. What he’d gone to see this afternoon was the destruction of a boy named Stuart Harding, who was seven.

  Now he was down on the Congo again, feeling jumpy. He had stolen a paper at the newsstand on Chapel Street and read it by the light of the only street lamp on Amora. There was a lot inside it about Marietta O’Brien and a piece on the boy who had lived that basically said nothing. There was nothing about the other one, lying in her apartment in that Spanish neighborhood across town, and he was beginning to be afraid. She had been a mean woman and a lonely one, not a mess of ineffectual sadness like Margaret Mary McVann. When he had knocked at her door she had snapped at him, and then given him a long lecture on what a sin it was to go slumming. It had almost made him laugh. What she had seen of him was just his skin. He was white and that was all she had wanted to know. She had simply assumed that he must be from a rich family uptown, down in the barrio looking for drugs—she called it the barrio, the Spanish people he had met up to then had called it the neighborhood or the parish. He had stared at his sneakers and sucked in his cheeks to keep from screaming at her. His sneakers were full of holes. He had pulled them out of a trash can on Prospect Street the day after he had escaped from The Apartment. On that day he had been dressed in beautiful clothes, expensive things from the troves that had arrived at The Apartment’s door every week, via one of the johns who went out of town to buy it. The johns liked the boys to be well dressed, well fed, well washed, well groomed. They wanted to think they were giving the boys a Better Life than the one they would have had if they’d stayed where they’d been found. The johns never asked about where the boys had been found, or if they’d wanted to leave. Asking questions like that made things too complicated.

  He hadn’t dared keep the clothes once he left The Apartment, because they stood out. There weren’t that many boys on the streets of New Haven wearing sixty-dollar sneakers and two-ply cashmere sweaters. He hadn’t wanted to keep the clothes, because they were like a brand. Walk down the street dressed like that and everyone knew you were a whore. Every john in creation perked up his antennae and followed them to your door. Johns popped out of gas stations and police stations and restaurants and put their hands on their wallets. He had needed some old clothes. He had found them in the only place he knew of where old clothes lived: the Salvation Army. He had broken in there after dark and taken what he needed, everything but the sneakers, because they hadn’t had any sneakers in his size. Then he had stripped to the skin and changed. He had not, however, thrown the expensive clothes away. He had other uses for them. He had been on his honor to give them back to the man who had bought and paid for them.

  The woman down in the barrio, or the neighborhood, or the parish, or whatever you wanted to call it, had gone bitter from thinking she was trying to do good. She had been one of those people who think they know what everybody else in the world needs. Like all those people, she had been angry when she found out that nobody else in the world agreed with her. He had waited until she turned her back on him, reaching for a book to prove her point about everything, before he went for her neck. She had had a thick neck and he had found it hard to break.

  Later, on his way to see Marietta, he had wondered if he had made a mistake. He couldn’t believe that woman had ever had a vocation to reject. He couldn’t believe she had ever even believed in God. Who she had reminded him of was the old lady that had lived behind their house in Oxford. The old lady had been abandoned by her husband and deserted by her children, and his mother always told him the old lady was on her way to Hell.

  2

  What Stuart Harding was was the new boy, the one they had picked up out in North Branford only a week ago. He was an ordinary one, born to a mother who abandoned him, fostered out to a pair of jerks who liked to beat him up. When he had first arrived at The Apartment, he had been covered with bruises from his neck to his knees. There was nothing at all on the parts of him that showed, on his face or hands or neck. It was possible that the man who had brought him in didn’t know about the bruises at all. It made for something of a dilemma when they first stripped him down. No boy was ever allowed to stay at The Apartment if he was damaged. Scars and cigarette burns were a death sentence. Lots of the johns liked to spank and some of them liked to whip, but the equipment kept for those purposes was carefully and custom made. The leather straps made welts when they hit hard enough, but not the kind of welts that lasted. It was the same with the restraints. There was always some john or other who wanted to use handcuffs. For some reason he had never been able to figure out, johns had a positive affinity for handcuffs. They were never allowed to get any near the boys. Instead, the closet in the extra room was full of leather cuffs, leather masks, leather gags—soft leather all of it, beaten until it was pliable, strong enough to tie a boy still but not sharp enough to cut or chafe him.

  With Stuart Harding it was touch and go. They stripped him down and checked him over, but with all that black and blue it was hard to tell. Anything could have been hidden under those bruises. He remembered standing in the doorway of the room he shared with five other boys while the men talked it over, the men who were not johns but who brought the johns. On the street they would have been called pimps, but that was not quite accurate. On the street, pimps took a girl’s money and disappeared. They didn’t drum up business. As far as he could tell, all these men did was drum up business. He stood with the door open and the light out in the room behind him, holding his breath. He was already planning his escape and there were things he needed to know.

  “Look,” one of the men said, “he’s not circumcised. Finding one that’s not been circumcised is like finding gold.”

  “I thought they had to be circumcised,” one of the other men said. “I thought the hospitals insisted on it.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t born in a hospital,” the first man said. “
Maybe his mother popped him in an alley somewhere between junk hits. Who the hell cares?”

  “If his mother had been a junkie he wouldn’t be so bright.”

  “All I care about,” the first man said, “is that he hasn’t been circumcised, and we got half a dozen guys who’ll pay a hundred-dollar premium for that.”

  “If we keep him for a week, all it will cost us is food,” a third man said. “Then the bruises will have worn off and we’ll know.”

  As it turned out, they had had to keep him for more than a week. They had had to keep him for over two months, which was why Stuart was still not turned out when he had escaped, and why he had had to go back today to watch it happen. He could remember with absolute clarity the day it had happened to him—not in the car, but later, in The Apartment, with the man who had first spanked him and then rammed an orange neon dildo up his ass—and from that day to this he hadn’t been able to stay away from it. It was a kind of ritual slaughter. For Stuart Harding it had been less than that, because Stuart Harding had been psychologically dead long before he ever got back to The Apartment. He had blown all his fuses as soon as he had been raped in the car.

  3

  He was out on that street again now, the one with all the roosters in the windows. A few more blocks, a few more turns, and he would be back at the church. He wanted to find a church tonight and he would, but not until he had done what he had come to do.

  He came to an intersection, checked the street signs—Sullivan and Vane—and turned down Sullivan toward the main drag and Saint Raphael’s Hospital. The houses on Sullivan had mostly been broken up into apartments and were mostly dark. He had recognized on his first trip here that this was a street of single people, never married or widowed or just out on their own. A lot of the nurses from the hospital lived here. So did a little group of nuns, who—according to the one he had talked to, asking directions on the way to that woman’s house—were trying out “an experiment in new forms of living in community.” He had liked the nun very much, even though she wasn’t wearing a habit. She was an older woman with a big mop of hair and a job at Saint Raphael’s as some kind of nurse. A lot of the people who lived on Sullivan Street worked at Saint Raphael’s as nurses.

  He went down a block on Sullivan Street, and then another block, and then another, and stopped in front of the house where he had killed her. Her apartment was on the second floor, and it was dark. He had left it dark after he cut her, because although he needed her found he didn’t want her found right away. Now he saw that all the other apartments in her building were dark, too. If she disappeared for a while, nobody would notice, except to be relieved. Nobody would go out looking for her.

  There was a phone booth up at the far end of the block. He hesitated for a moment more, staring at her windows, wondering what she was like up there, if there were mice that had come out of the walls and eaten her. Then he walked down the street to the phone and dialed 911.

  Part Six

  Chapter One

  1

  FROM WHAT PAT MALLORY could remember, in the old days there had been places in the city of New Haven where it had been possible to take a girl for dinner, spend between thirty and fifty dollars, and make her feel as if she’d been transported to one of the nicer sections of New York. Of course, in the old days—in the days when Pat Mallory was more interested in girls than women—he hadn’t been able to afford to take a girl to dinner. Now he thought it might be impossible to find the kind of place he was looking for at any price, especially in the center of the city proper. He had to be in the center of the city because he was on call, as he had been on call now for over a month. He had to keep his beeper within range of the call room at police headquarters, or he had to go home, where he could be reached by phone. He supposed he could go to one of those fancy restaurants out in the country and then call in and leave the number, but he didn’t like the idea. There were too many people in the New Haven Police Department who would love to know where and when he was having a date.

  Assuming that what was going on here was a date.

  He looked across to the other side of the car and saw Susan Murphy take a pack of cigarettes out of her jacket pocket and light up. He didn’t mind, but he thought it said something about how long she had spent in a convent and how recently she’d come out. She obviously didn’t know there were people out here—men as well as women—who went totally insane at the very idea of someone smoking tobacco.

  She was fumbling around on the dashboard, looking for the ashtray and not finding it. He leaned forward and got it open for her.

  “I’m going to tell you now what I told you back at the hospital,” he said. “If I was your brother Dan, I wouldn’t let you go wandering around the streets at night.”

  “I’m going to tell you now what I told you back at the hospital,” she said. “If you were my brother Dan, you wouldn’t have anything to say about it.” She leaned toward the windshield and looked out. “Is that the Payne Whitney gymnasium? Where are we?”

  “We’re not near the Payne Whitney gymnasium. We’re around the other side near the cemetery. That’s a Yale something.”

  “Everything in New Haven is a Yale something.”

  “Except the stuff that’s a Catholic something.”

  They looked at each other and laughed. “Oh, well,” Susan said. “I’m sorry I gave you such a shock. I’d had a fight with Dan and I was restless—I told you about that. I just wish life was like television a little, with resolutions.”

  “Do you like television?”

  “I don’t know. We weren’t allowed to have them, in my order, except that the sister superior always had one locked up in a closet just in case of an assassination or an earthquake or something. I watched for about an hour a couple of days after I got home—my brother Andy has a whole list of shows he watches every week—do you know my brother Andy?”

  “You know I do. You were with him the first time I met you, at Damien House.”

  “That’s right. A lot of people find him invisible. Anyway, after he went to bed I jumped through the channels for a while, on this cable box, and there were things—”

  “Sex,” Pat said solemnly.

  “Sadomasochism with genitals,” Susan said. “One of the things my reverend mother always told me was that it was a mortal sin not to call a spade a spade. This particular spade that I saw ought to have been rated triple-X. And do you know what was odd?”

  “What?”

  “I’d always been told that the point of pornography was to arouse the passions. That’s how they would have put it in my moral theology class. But good grief, Pat, that thing put my passions into a deep freeze for a week. I don’t believe there are women out there dreaming of having some man urinate on them.”

  “There aren’t. Those things aren’t made for women.”

  “Are there things like that made for women?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” Pat said. “I’ve been a cop for I don’t remember how long. Seventeen, eighteen years. I’ve seen the evidence in hundreds of obscenity raids—back when we had obscenity raids. I’ve been in a thousand porno shops for one reason or another, usually to look at a corpse. People tell me they make porno for women, but I’ve never actually seen any.”

  “Maybe it’s lesbian porno. I went to a conference once where this woman talked about lesbian feminism.”

  “Three-quarters of the videotapes in any porno store are lesbian videotapes. Men love to watch them.”

  “Marvelous.”

  “If I wasn’t so sure this guy we’ve got is picking his victims in advance, I’d fill you full of dinner and then take you home and lock you in your room. Every time you blow smoke in my face, I keep thinking of Marietta O’Brien.”

  On the other side of the car the cigarette went up to Susan’s mouth, down at the ashtray, up to Susan’s mouth again. The car was filled with a thin haze of smoke that Pat liked the smell of, although he didn’t usually like the smell of smoke. Susan had c
racked her window a little and most of it was drifting outside, being replaced by sharp cold air that was doing its job of keeping them both awake.

  He felt rather than saw her turn away from him, struggling under the restraint of her seatbelt. He felt rather than saw her turn back. He wondered if she was thinking about their talk at Damien House. Tacitly, they had decided to forget about that, at least on the conversational level. She hadn’t mentioned it, and he wouldn’t. He couldn’t believe she wasn’t at least thinking about it.

  Her cigarette was out. She dumped the butt in the ashtray and got another. He wondered if she’d been a heavy smoker before she entered her order.

  “Pat,” she said, hesitant, “you think you know who killed those women, don’t you? You think it’s the same person who killed those boys.”

  “No. I think it’s connected to the killings of the boys. Two different murderers with two different reasons.”

  “But connected.”

  “Oh, yes. I’ve been half sure of it for a couple of weeks. Then I had that talk I told you about, with Bishop Riley.” He hadn’t mentioned the lecture he ended up delivering. The memory of it made him feel like a jerk. “Now I don’t have the names and addresses of anybody—except I’ve got the alias of one of them—this is getting convoluted. I know who in the sense that I know what: what they are, what they’re involved in. In the case of the boys, I even know why they’re doing what they’re doing. And, yes, they’re connected.”

  Susan nodded. “This conviction you’ve got that they’re all connected, it doesn’t rest on the idea that the man who’s murdering the ex-nuns is picking them out in advance, does it? I mean picking them out of announcements in the diocesan newspaper or because he knows them and they’ve told him they were nuns or anything like that.”