The Big Bad City

by McBain, Ed

  “Who’s been brainwashing you?” her mother asks.

  Dr. Moira Cochran is a Freudian analyst who remembers all too well that the master himself considered religion a “group-obsessional neurosis.” That her daughter has now decided she “has a vocation,” that her daughter now wishes to become “a bride of Christ” who will swear vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience once she has completed her postulancy and her novitiate …

  “Is that what you learned at that goddamn school?” she asks.

  That “goddamn school” is one of the most prestigious colleges in the United States, and Kate has been graduated from it with honors and a 3.8 index as a political science major and a psychology minor—so much for the token gesture to the old folks at home. In the meantime, because she has a splendid voice and a true love of music, she has joined a choral group in her sophomore year, and then the church choir in her junior year. It is there that she initially meets a visiting nun named Sister Beatrice Camden of the Order of the Sisters of Christ’s Mercy, who comes to instruct the choir in a complicated four-part hymn composed by Jacopone da Todi in the thirteenth century.

  Kate is hardly a religious person. With a father like Ronald and a mother like Moira, she could never be considered even faintly religious. She is singing in the church choir because she loves to sing, but she is also fascinated by Sister Beatrice, who is the first person who ever suggests to her that her voice is perhaps God-given. Well, bullshit, she thinks, and she admits this to her stunned parents and to her brother and his girlfriend …

  “I mean, my voice is a result of genetic downloading, am I right? So what’s this nonsense about it being God-given?”

  … and yet the notion is somehow exciting, her voice being a gift from God and therefore something more than a mere human voice, something rather more exalted instead. When Sister Beatrice asks Kate to join her and some of the other sisters for dinner one night, she recognizes that a sort of recruiting process is beginning, but she’s flattered by all the attention. And besides, she begins to realize she likes these people. There’s an air of dedication about these young women that seems singularly lacking in the college girls all around Kate. The girls she knows are always talking about getting laid or getting married whereas these women in the Order of the Sisters of Christ’s Mercy are talking about lives devoted to serving God by helping other people. They are talking about a vocation, a ministry, a charism. They are talking about meaningful lives, they …

  “Meaningful, my ass!” Moira shouts in an outburst rare for a psychiatrist trained to listen patiently and never to comment. “You’ll be locking yourself away from the rest of the world! You’ll be …”

  “It isn’t …”

  “… marching backward into the twelfth century!”

  “It isn’t like that anymore!”

  Kate then goes on to explain, to four sets of ears growing increasingly more deaf, that she was given informational books about the order …

  “Which the sisters call the OSCM, by the way …”

  … as if it’s IBM or TWA, a refreshingly modern way of thinking about themselves that forever dispels for Kate any notions of nuns wearing hair shirts. For the past year now …

  “Is that how long this has been going on?” Vincent yells.

  … she’s spent time with the order’s Vocation Director, and she’s been visiting with the order’s Spiritual Director, taking psychological tests, addressing her finances, meeting as well with the Formation Director …

  “A goddamn cult!” her father shouts.

  … to set up a system for herself, finally creating an individual program best suited to her talents and her needs.

  “I’m going to be a nurse,” she says. “It’s how I can best help people. It’s how I can best serve God. I know I’ll be sacrificing a home of my own, a family. I know I’ll be sacrificing comfort and independence. But as Christ’s bride …”

  “I can’t believe this!” Vincent says.

  … in union with Christ, she will also be sacrificing herself for the redemption of souls. Like Christ, she will live her life in poverty, simplicity, purity, and chastity. And she will forever offer, as only a spouse can, love and solace to His Sacred Heart.

  She tells her parents, and her brother, and Anna Hawley that she’ll be leaving for the mother house as soon as certain documents have been signed …

  “You’re signing away your life,” her mother says.

  “This is totally stupid,” Vincent says.

  “But it’s what I’m going to do,” Kate says.

  “No, you’re not!” her father shouts.

  “Yes, I am,” she says calmly. “It’s my life,” she says. “Not yours.”

  To which, of course, there is no answer.

  Anna Hawley paused.

  “There was nothing anyone could do to stop her,” she said.

  “So she left,” Carella said.

  “Yes. She left At the end of May.”

  Again, Anna hesitated.

  “I suppose Vincent might have forgiven her sooner or later. But then, of course, her parents were killed.”

  At his desk across the room, Meyer said into the telephone, “Just hang on to it, sir, we’ll be right there. Thanks a lot.”

  “Killed?” Carella said.

  “How?” Brown said.

  “Bert, let’s go,” Meyer said.

  “A car crash,” Anna said. “On the Fourth of July, last year. Kate’s father was driving. They’d been drinking too much.”

  “Steve, we’re off. Piece of jewelry just surfaced.”

  “Where’s the shop?” Kling asked, and followed him out of the squadroom.

  “Vincent could never forgive her after that,” Anna said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “He blamed her for the accident. It was only after Kate became a nun that they began drinking heavily, you see.”

  “That’s Vincent’s reasoning, huh?” Brown said.

  “Yes, and he’s right,” Anna said. “If she’d stayed home, they’d still be alive.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It was her fault.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Which is why he wouldn’t come up here to claim the body, right?” Carella said.

  “That doesn’t mean he killed her,” Anna said.

  Brown was thinking some people should learn when to keep their big mouths shut.

  “Sent you instead, right?” he said. “To tell us all this?”

  “No, I had to be in the city, anyway.”

  “You come in every Wednesday?”

  “I come in whenever I’m done.”

  “Done?”

  “With the galleys.”

  “When’s the last time you were in, Miss Hawley?”

  “Last Friday,” she said.

  8

  IT WAS VERY HOT HERE IN THIS SMALL SHOP CLUTTERED WITH THE FLOTSAM AND JETSAM OF COUNTLESS LIVES foundering on bad times. Meyer and Kling were wearing lightweight sports jackets on this steamy Wednesday at one P.M., but not because they wished to appear elegantly dressed. The jackets were there to hide the shoulder holster each was wearing, lest the populace of this fair city panicked in the streets. The owner of the shop was wearing a white short-sleeved sports shirt open at the throat. A jeweler’s loupe hung on a black silk cord around his neck.

  He introduced himself as Manny Schwartz. The name on his license was Emanuel Schwartz. The license, in a black frame, was hanging on the wall behind him, together with an accordion, a saxophone, a trombone, several trumpets, a tambourine, and a ukulele. Meyer wondered if an entire orchestra had come in here to hock its instruments.

  Schwartz took a ring from the case, and handed it across the counter. “This is what she brought in,” he said. “It’s Islamic. Ninth to eleventh century A.D. Origin is probably Greater Syria.”

  The square signet was engraved with the drawing of a goat or possibly some other animal with long ears, it was hard to tell. This was surrounded by engraved
petals or leaves, again it was difficult to tell exactly which. The tapering shank was engraved on both sides with a pair of snakes, or perhaps crocodiles, flanking a long-tailed bird. A pair of engraved fish swam upward from the very bottom of the shank toward the signet. Meyer wished he knew what the talismanic markings meant. It was a sort of cheerful ring. It made him wonder why there was so much strife in the Middle East.

  “What the caliphs did,” Schwartz said, “they brought in artisans trained in the Greek and Roman traditions, had them adapt their work to the needs of Arab patrons. This ring was probably commissioned by an upper-class member of society. It was an expensive ring, even back then. Today, it’s worth around twelve grand.”

  “What’d you pay for it?”

  “Three thousand. Little did I know it was stolen. Now I can shove it up my ass, right?”

  He was referring to the odd legal distinction between a “bona fide purchaser for value” and “a person in knowing possession of stolen goods.” Schwartz had read the list of stolen goods the Eight-Seven had circulated, and he now knew that the Syrian ring was hot property. He could have ignored this, gone on to sell the ring at a profit, pretended he’d never seen the list. But if that ring ever got traced back to him, he was looking at a D-felony and a max of two-and-a-third to seven in the slammer. He’d called the police instead, who would now undoubtedly seize the ring as evidence. Some you win, some you lose.

  “Did she give you a name?” Meyer asked.

  “Yes. But it probably wasn’t her real name.”

  “What name did she give you?”

  “Marilyn Monroe.”

  “What makes you think that wasn’t her real name?” Meyer asked.

  “Marilyn Monroe?”

  “We once arrested a guy named Ernest Hemingway, he wasn’t Ernest Hemingway.”

  “Who was he?”

  “He was Ernest Hemingway. What I mean is, he wasn’t the Ernest Hemingway, he was just someone who happened to be named Ernest Hemingway.”

  “Who’s that?” Schwartz asked. “Ernest Hemingway.”

  “I’ll bet we look in the phone book right this minute,” Meyer said, “we’ll find a dozen Marilyn Monroes.”

  “Which wasn’t her real name, either,” Schwartz said.

  “What was her real name?” Kling asked.

  “The girl who brought the ring in?”

  “No. Marilyn Monroe.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So what’d this woman look like?” Meyer asked. It bothered him now that he couldn’t remember what Marilyn Monroe’s real name was. Kling had a habit of bringing up annoying little questions that could bug a man all day long.

  “She was maybe thirty, thirty-five years old,” Schwartz said. “Five-four, weighed a hundred and ten, brown hair, brown eyes, nice trim figure. Wearing shorts and a T-shirt … well, this rotten weather. Sandals. Blue sandals.”

  “You noticed what she had on her feet?”

  “Woman in shorts, a nice trim figure, you notice her legs and her feet.”

  “Did she give you an address?”

  “She did. Which is why I figured maybe Marilyn Monroe was her real name, after all. I mean, if a person’s going to pick a phony name, why such a famous one?”

  “That’s right,” Meyer said.

  “Was what I figured.”

  “Norma Something,” Kling said.

  “I don’t think so,” Meyer said.

  “Also, she gave me a phone number.”

  “Did she show you identification?”

  “No. She said it was an heirloom she had to hock because she’d left her wallet in a taxi with a lot of money in it.”

  “You believed her.”

  “It could happen. This city, anything could happen. Besides, I was getting a twelve-thousand-dollar ring for three thousand.”

  “Ever occur to you it might be stolen?”

  “It occurred. It also occurred it might only be lost. People don’t usually report lost items to the police. So if it wasn’t reported, it wouldn’t show up on any list, am I right? And if it isn’t on a list, then I don’t know it’s stolen goods and I’m still a bona fide purchaser for value. Was what I thought.”

  “Can we have the address and phone number she gave you?”

  “Sure. You going to take the ring, right?”

  “We have to.”

  “Sure.”

  “We’ll give you a receipt for it.”

  “Sure,” Schwartz said. “Sometimes I wish I wasn’t so honest.”

  “Jean Something?” Kling said.

  It was cooler here in the park. Gentle breezes from the river blunted the edge of the afternoon heat, promising eventual relief, perhaps even rain. Carella sat with his sister on a bench overlooking the distant water. Her twin daughters were on the playground equipment. Cynthia and Melinda, reduced to Cindy and Mindy, as Carella had dreaded would happen from the moment she named them. Her older daughter had fared better. Tess, modern and sleek, for Teresa, which conjured up cobblestoned streets in a mountaintop village in Potenza. Tess was supervising the twins now. Seven years old and looking after the little ones. Cindy and Mindy had been born on the twenty-eighth of July, eleven days after his father was killed. They reminded him of his own twins when they were small. It occurred to him that his sister was one of the few people in the world who knew him when he himself was small. Forty, he reminded himself. In October, you will be forty.

  “It was good of you to meet me,” Angela said.

  “It’s no trouble,” he said.

  It was four o’clock, and he was on his way home, but he’d have met his sister whenever, wherever, because he loved her to death. She had specified the park, it would be cooler than her apartment, she’d said. We have to talk, she’d said. He waited now for her to begin. In his profession, he was skilled at waiting for people to begin talking.

  “It finally looks as if it’s going to be a clean break,” she said.

  She was talking about her divorce. Married for twelve years, and now a divorce. He would always remember the date of her wedding. He had rushed Teddy to the hospital directly from the reception. Twelve years ago this past June. His twins had turned twelve on the twenty-second. And he would be forty in October. Cut it out, he thought. It’s not the end of the world. Oh no? he thought.

  “Tommy’s moving to California. I think he met a girl who lives out there, he’s leaving at the end of the month. It’ll be better, Steve, I really think so. It’s still painful, you know. I mean, whenever he comes by to pick up Tess and the twins, I remember what it used to be like. It’s painful, Steve. Divorce is painful.”

  People who had twins never referred to them as “the kids” or “the children,” they were always “the twins.” He wondered what that must be like for twins themselves, always to be referred to as half of a whole, like a comedy team. The last time he’d seen his brother-in-law was when Tommy had told him he was entering a rehab program. That was after the marriage was shot, after he’d stolen and hocked virtually everything they’d owned, after he’d hit Angela with a closed fist one night when she tried to stop him from taking the twins’ silver teething rings that were a gift from Aunt Josie in Florida, Carella wanted to kill him. So now he was moving to California, and Angela thought it would be for the best, which it probably would—but was that why she’d asked to meet him in the park at four o’clock in the afternoon?

  He waited.

  He was very good at waiting.

  “Steve,” she said, and drew a deep breath. “Steve, honey, you’re not going to like this.”

  He knew at once what it was. And he knew he was not going to like it, already did not like it. But she was his sister, and when he saw the troubled look on her face, he wanted to take her in his arms and say, Hey, come on, Sis, this is me, how bad can it be, huh? But he knew how bad it could be, knew what she was going to tell him, and wondered how he could possibly handle it.

  “I know how you feel about Henry,” she said, and dr
ew another deep breath. “I know you think he could have sent Sonny Cole to prison, that somehow he screwed up …”

  “Angela …”

  “No, please, Steve, let me finish. I’ve talked to him a lot about the case, and he really did do his best, Steve, he really was surprised by some of the stuff the defense …”

  “He shouldn’t have been surprised,” Carella said. “His job is not to be surprised. Sonny Cole killed Papa! And Lowell let him walk.”

  “So did you, Steve,” she said.

  Which she shouldn’t have thrown back at him because he’d been talking brother to sister when he’d told her about that night in a deserted hallway with only Sonny Cole and a black cop named Randall Wade who kept whispering “Do it” in his ear. He hadn’t told that to anyone else in the world but his wife, and now Angela was throwing it back at him. He had done what he’d thought was the right thing. If he had pulled the trigger on Sonny Cole that night … no, he couldn’t have.

  “I believe in the system,” he said now.

  “So do I.”

  “I thought the system …”

  “So did I. But Henry isn’t the system. It was the system that let Cole walk after Henry did his best to put him away. You have to believe that, Steve.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because we’re moving in together.”

  “Great,” he said. “The man who …”

  “No.”

  “Yes! He did screw up, Angela. That’s why Sonny Cole is still out there someplace …”

  … his arm going up now, his finger pointing out over the small hill above the park, his finger stabbing at the near distance …

  “… maybe killing somebody else’s father!”

  From where Sonny lay on his belly on the grassy knoll overlooking the park below, he thought at first that Carella had spotted him and was pointing at him. He didn’t know who the girl with him on the bench was, but all at once both of them were up on their feet and the girl was hugging him and Carella just stood there looking sort of helpless and foolish and then he …