by Dane Hartman
“Do I have anything to say?” Morrisson responded incredulously. “Do I have anything to say? You bet I have something to say!”
“Remember,” Collins said quickly. “Anything you say can be used against you.”
Morrisson fell silent again.
“Oh good,” Collins said. “Now we can get on with the really neat stuff. First, let’s see if we have the right Tom Morrisson. You are Tom Morrisson of 365 Commonwealth Avenue, apartment 4D?”
“Yeah,” Morrisson answered miserably.
“The Tom Morrisson who is an undergraduate theater major at Emerson College?”
“Yeah, that’s me,” Morrisson nodded.
“The Tom Morrisson who is a chairman of the organization called The Order of the Orenda?”
The young man had leaped out of his seat. “How do you know about that?” he shouted, coming around the table. Collins sat unaffected as Harry met Morrisson halfway. Tom looked up into Harry’s lined face and thought better of moving anymore. He slowly returned to his seat while Collins laughed.
“Oh, we know a lot about all sorts of different cults that pop up in Boston, Thomas. We make it a practise to find out all we can about all these perverted sects.”
Callahan had to admit to himself that Collins knew what he was doing. He had pegged Morrisson as a hopped-up hothead as soon as he entered the room, then degraded Tom’s most cherished beliefs in the most callous way he knew. All his words were designed to get a rise out of the kid.
It worked quickly. “It is not a cult!” Morrisson shouted, standing next to his seat. “And it is not perverted! It’s the original belief! The belief of the true Americans.”
“Yes, we know,” Collins responded knowledgeably. “The American Indian beliefs. But there are so many different tribes with so many different beliefs.”
“We take the best of all of them,” Morrisson cried with pride.
“What?” Collins queried. “Like the Iroquois who believed there was more than one soul which traveled to different places depending on how the body died? Like the Algonquians who believed evil spirits must be driven out of the body for a happier life? Like the Plains Indians, who cut off joints of fingers as a sacrifice?
“Or do you go further?” Collins leaned in, his voice rising in pitch and speed. “Are you like the Pawnee, who murdered young squaws in the name of the morning star? Or are you like the Inca and Maya who didn’t need an excuse to raid a neighboring tribe for a virgin sacrifice? Or the Aztec who made special raids to acquire their victims and slaughtered them by the hundreds?”
“No!” Morrisson screamed, clawing across the table for Collins’ throat. He gripped the black man’s neck just as Callahan swiped him across the room with the back of his hand.
Morrisson flew bodily off the table, traveled three feet through the air, and slid in a crumbled mass against the wall. Collins merely straightened his coat and tie.
“No,” Morrisson said feebly from the floor, tears rolling down his cheeks. “I am a shaman. We believe in purity and the Great Spirit. We believe in Brotherhood . . .”
The boy’s words reduced to incoherent babble. Collins rose, looking at the huddled mass in the corner.
“That’s about all we can do here,” Collins grimaced.
“It’s enough,” said Harry.
“Yeah,” Collins agreed, calling in the uniformed men to take the boy away. “Feel like a little ride?” the black detective asked Callahan when they got out into the hall.
“Sure,” said Harry, knowing an order when he heard one. “Why not?” Harry may have outranked Collins, but Boston was the black man’s town. He’d have an easier time making things stick than Callahan.
They went downstairs, out the back, and into Collins’ unmarked El Dorado. “What’s going to happen to the kid?” Harry asked, settling into the plush red passenger seat.
“Probably going to have to send him to the hospital now,” Collins mused. “Find out what’s making him crazy. Hold him a couple of days for observation.”
For the second time, Harry wanted to mention the kid’s lack of food, but he had purposely omitted the information before, so he stuck with his little white lie. “What then?” he asked.
“Then,” Collins retorted, starting the car’s engine, “then we’ll probably release him.”
Harry sat up. “What?”
“We have a little problem with your charges, Inspector,” Collins said pulling out into the sparse night traffic.
“Such as?” Harry inquired, ignoring the many sights along the wide avenues.
“First and foremost,” Collins said, watching the road, “the assault with a deadly weapon.”
“He attacked a girl with a hunting knife!” Harry said incredulously, his hackles rising. “You mean they don’t have a law against that here?”
Rather than responding to Callahan’s obvious sarcasm, Collins went curtly to the heart of the matter. “Where’s the girl? Where’s the knife?”
That caught Harry unawares. Finding Christine should be no problem, but he had assumed that Tom had the knife on him when he ran. “Find the girl and you’ll probably find the knife,” was what Harry concluded aloud.
“Probably, probably,” Collins echoed, turning right onto a wide, two-way street. Harry saw the Boston Gardens, the companion park to the Common to the left at the end of the block. “But until then, we have another deadly weapon to worry about.”
Harry didn’t like the sound of that. Collins didn’t wait for a response. “I mean, after all, it’s only your word that Morrisson attacked the girl with a knife. I mean, he didn’t attack you with the knife, now did he?” Collins still didn’t pause for an answer. “No, from what I hear, he nearly attacked you with a gun until you took it away from him, A big gun. A cannon, Morrisson called it.”
Collins looked out the corner of his eye at Callahan again as they stopped for a red light. Harry just stared at the detective. “That’s what took me so long,” Collins explained. “I had a couple of brothers in the hospital talking real loud about a big white dude who beat up on them with a cannon and, of all things, a ghetto blaster. They wanted to press charges until I talked them out of it. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that deadly weapon, would you?”
Harry picked up the cue. Collins did him a favor by not pushing through the music man’s charge of assault, so now Harry was supposed to make it easy on him. Thankfully, it was not just the politest thing to do, it was the wisest. Harry reached into his brown tweed coat and pulled out his Magnum .44. He opened the cylinder, dropped the rounds into his hand, and passed it over to Collins.
“Whooee,” the detective whistled softly. “They were right. That is a cannon. What is that, a .44 with a . . . how long barrel?”
“Six and a half inch barrel,” Harry said tiredly.
“A dude your size I would’ve pegged as hauling a nickel-plated eight and three-eights incher for sure.”
“What it makes up in velocity and sight radius it loses in portability,” Harry said flatly.
Collins didn’t want to leave it at that, however. He seemed intent on picturing Harry as the laconic, conservative, right-wing cowboy from the West. “Hey, this is the same sort of gun Son of Sam used, isn’t it?”
“A misconception. The .44 is a widely used caliber. Berkowitz used a Charter Arms .44. The gun you’re holding is a Smith and Wesson Model 29. A Charter Arms gun was also used to shoot George Wallace. A Charter Arms .38 killed John Lennon.”
“That company gets around, doesn’t it?”
“Makes a lot of police weapons as well,” Harry commented.
Collins slipped in the next question casually but quickly. “You got a license to carry this thing in Massachusetts?”
Harry’s silence was the best answer. Collins clucked in sympathy, “I wouldn’t worry about it, Inspector. I’ll put an application through for you as soon as I get to my office. You can pick up your gun when it comes in or when you’re about to leave the state, whi
chever comes first.”
“How long does the license take?”
“Oh, about five or six weeks,” Collins said as the light went green and he moved the car forward. “A month if I push it.”
“Don’t bother,” Harry said, adjusting to the idea. If he really needed a gun, he had no doubt he could get one where all the criminals did—underground. That song and dance over with, Harry got back to the main topic on his mind. “You seem to know a hell of a lot about Indians,” he said by way of introducing the subject.
Collins wanted to fence words some more. “You know a lot about guns.”
Callahan didn’t want to play. “What was all that about the Order of the Orenda?”
“It’s the name of their quasi-religious group,” Collins said, tooling up to the Common. “Orenda is the Iroquois name of the spirit that lives inside everything. Did you see that horror movie called The Manitou?” Harry shook his head. “It was based on the Algonquian word for the same spirit. Naturally the filmmakers added a lot more blood and guts.”
“Naturally,” Harry said sourly. “But what do these kids see in something like that?”
“They figure it does Unitarianism one better by going back to the source of true American beliefs. Since the Indians were here first and so noble and put upon, they think their religion was more pure.
“Unfortunately, these kids aren’t Indians. They’re middle-class Irish, Italian, and English. They tend to get a little carried away.”
“What do you mean?” Callahan pressed on.
“Ah, the whole thing about the purity of death and the blood brother shit and the Happy Hunting Ground concepts. It has a tenuous but bothersome connection to the Halliwell girl.”
“Who?” Harry asked as they passed the Boston Playboy Club on their right and went up to Tremont Street.
“Oh yeah, I forgot I didn’t tell you,” Collins answered. “Judy Halliwell. She was the girl who was murdered on the Beacon Hill rooftop last night. I thought you said you knew.”
“No,” Harry corrected as they took a left to pass the Savoy Theater. “I just read in the papers that the victim was an avid volunteer at the Unitarian Church offices. When I saw Morrisson and the girl Christine come out of there today, I made the connection. By the way, what did Morrisson say about the attack? Did he have a reason?”
“He denied the whole thing. Refused to make a statement. Said there was no girl.”
“OK, what about the Halliwell girl, then? Where does she come in?”
“Well,” said Collins, pulling in front of the Unitarian offices and stopping the car. “The murderer killed her, one of her cats, and another boy named John Monahan. As near as we can tell, Monahan was a mistake. He told his roommates at the dorm where he lived that he was going to a movie at the Charles Street Theater complex. That would put him in the general area of the crime. We’re almost sure he just passed by, heard something, and went to investigate. It was another horror number, by the way.”
“What was?”
“The movie. A horror movie called Just Before Dawn.”
Harry had heard of it. He didn’t care. He stayed away from that kind of garbage. “We’ve got enough horror of our own,” Callahan reminded the detective. “In reality. How does the Halliwell girl fit in?”
“It’s that virgin sacrifice thing,” Collins finally admitted. “I mean, the cat getting croaked; that could signify the soul of an animal released. And the rooftop; it could fill in as the sacrificial altar. Finally, there was a piece of information we didn’t release to the papers. The Halliwell girl was raped.”
“Evidence of semen?” Harry asked.
“No,” Collins shook his head. “The killer must’ve been spooked by Monahan’s arrival. According to the coroner, her hymen was broken, then the guy pulled out.”
“So she was a virgin.”
“Until last night, yeah. And she probably stayed that way until after she died.”
Harry swore aloud. Several times. Collins nodded in commiseration. They were not only dealing with a murderer but with a necrophiliac.
“All I can say, Inspector, is that you picked a hell of a time to go vacationing in Beantown,” Collins exclaimed. Their business was finished for the moment, so Harry took Collins’ stopping in front of the Beacon Street HQ as a cue for his exit. Harry pulled back the latch and opened the door.
“You’ll stay in touch?” Collins asked as Harry got halfway out the door.
“I’ll call when I get a room,” Harry replied, lifting himself out onto the sidewalk.
“I figure it doesn’t have to be said,” Collins called out the open passenger door, “but call me if you plan to leave town anytime soon.”
“You’re right,” said Harry. “It didn’t have to be said.” He closed the door. Collins honked once and drove away, Harry’s Magnum still on his dashboard.
Harry went up the Unitarian office building’s steps. The front door was locked. He walked all the way around the building. There were no lights on and no sign of a live-in custodian. Harry walked down the street to the intersection of Beacon and Charles streets. Charles looked far more lively, so he took a right onto it. He walked until he found a drugstore with an old-fashioned wooden telephone booth, complete with a recent directory.
He looked up “Donovan, Shanna.” He got the number, slipped a dime in the slot, and dialed. There was no answer after ten rings. He asked the woman behind the counter for directions and walked to Shanna’s apartment. It was a cellar room on a side street near the Charles River and Storrow Drive. Harry walked down the steps and knocked.
He waited for fifteen minutes, alternately knocking and sitting. While he waited, he thought. And while he thought, the depression came at him again.
There may have been something in what Linda had said. It didn’t seem likely, but Harry had seen stranger things happen in his career. In a world where people killed each other because they didn’t like Mondays, anything was possible. It was even possible that out of the millions of families on the Earth, a bunch of starving, knife-wielding Indian lovers had marked Shanna out for an execution.
It had been a rotten day. Superman had taunted him while he was getting an acute case of jet lag, he had broken two radios, he had nearly gotten creamed in an orange Pinto, he had argued with his favorite kin, and he had broken up a seemingly non-existent attempted murder. Harry was hungry, Harry was tired, and Harry was depressed.
He took the edge off of the first problem by finding a little steakhouse on the corner of Charles and Beacon streets which char-broiled a T-bone to his order. He took care of the latter two problems by taking a piece of paper out of his pocket and searching out the Sack 57 Hotel. It was across the street from a Benihana restaurant and built on top of a Howard Johnson’s. He rode up to the eleventh floor empty-handed. He knocked on the door of room 1115. Terri the stewardess, unlike the rest of the women in his life, was in.
She was wearing a beautiful silk robe and that was all. She had let down her golden blonde hair. Without her shoes she came up to Harry’s neck. He went to bed with her hoping he’d think he was back in California by the time the sun rose.
She had left when the phone rang the next morning. At first Harry had thought “fuck it,” but then he considered that Terri might have had an accident on the way to work. Maybe she hadn’t made the plane. Maybe it was her superiors calling to find out if everything was all right. Maybe it was Collins who had found her eye in her handbag and was calling whoever might be there to say that she had been sacrificed to the American Indians’ gods. At this point, Harry wasn’t disregarding any possibilities. He rolled over and picked up the phone receiver.
“Hello,” he said.
“Harry?” was the breathy reply. “Is this Harry, Shanna’s relative?”
Harry wanted to think about it, but dealing with a question like that in someone else’s hotel room could take a lot longer than the caller was willing to wait.
“Yes,” he answered quickly. “Chris
tine?”
“Yes,” it was her turn to answer.
“How did you get this number?” was his immediate question.
“Tom gave it to me,” was her immediate answer.
“Tom?” Harry said in surprise. He felt a breeze at the back of his neck. Or it could have been a chill, he wasn’t sure. “Christine, where are you?”
“I’m at school.”
“Emerson?”
“Yes, at the building down the street where Shanna’s apartment is. Harry, you must come right away. I have to talk to you.”
“Is Tom there with you now?” Harry asked hastily.
Christine sounded surprised. “No. Of course not.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Last night. After you chased him away. He only called me later to apologize for overreacting. He said that you told him to give me this number in case I wanted to get in touch with you.”
“All right,” said Harry quickly, already sitting up and pulling on his pants. “Stay there. If you’re in a class, stay with the group. If you’re alone, go outside. Wait for me outside where some other people can see you. If you see Tom, be careful. Find some other people and stay with them. Don’t let him get you alone and watch out for any sudden moves.”
“Talk about overreacting!” Christine laughed in astonishment. “Tom just went away for a while because he hadn’t eaten in a couple of days. Now he’s back. It’s all right, Harry.”
Harry pulled on his shirt. “I’m sure it is, Christine,” he soothed. “Just do me a favor. No big deal. Keep your eyes open.”
“Sure, Harry,” agreed the girl. “Hurry up, will you? All this talk of sudden moves is giving me the creeps.”
“I’ll be right there. And Christine . . . ?”
“Yes?”
“What’s your last name?”
“Sherman,” she said without question or hesitation.
They both said good-bye and hung up. Harry slipped on his shoes, pulled on his jacket, went to the hotel-room door, turned completely around, and went back to the phone. He called up the Boston Police. When a sergeant answered, he identified himself and asked for Collins.