A Cruel Season for Dying

by Harker Moore

  “Why?” He looked up at his father.

  “I thought you should have it.”

  He was silent, forcing his father to say more.

  “Your brother has no real interest….” He’d been obliged to spoil it. “You are firstborn,” he amended.

  “Why now?”

  Isao smiled, but there was nothing of humor or pleasure in the expression. His eyes were as Hanae’s, fixed on his face, dark and searching. His father’s lips moved in some mute gesture of communication, dismissing the smile with the barest sign of denial. A minute shaking of his head.

  No translation for this silent script. He thanked his father for the generous gift of the sword.

  Hanae returned with tea and fresh cups. She sat between them and poured, her butterfly questions filling space with replies from his father.

  Susan and the children were fine. Paul had made a fine gastroenterologist and was an asset to the practice. Elizabeth had been happier since her divorce, and she was gaining quite a national reputation with her watercolors and sumi-e. It was possible she might have a showing in New York.

  He half listened, giving answers when required to. He despised his reactions, the childishness of the feelings he still harbored. He did not know how to change them.

  His father had something to tell him. That much he understood, but he was too exhausted tonight to try to clear some ground on which they might meet. He was infinitely glad when Isao rose, suggesting they see each other tomorrow before his plane left for the Coast.

  Tomorrow was an eternity. He agreed.

  CHAPTER

  17

  Coldness had plastered itself against the nearby window, an emanation of outdoors that came through in lieu of light. The finches, disturbed today for no discernible reason, chirped and fluttered behind their metal bars, while Taiko dozed fitfully at her feet. Hanae sat forward at her worktable, her fingers struggling with the clay. She had hoped that the bust of Jimmy might be finished before Christmas, but despite her efforts, she was making no progress. And the gift of his portrait seemed more than ever urgent.

  She knew her husband. She clung to that. But more than her secrets, there were questions unspoken between them, which she had lately begun to acknowledge. Why had Jimmy chosen her? Hanae. Damaged blossom. Was it not in part that she might make the perfect wife for an American policeman? Japanese women expected to be neglected by their husbands. A blind Japanese woman was the child of isolation. She believed that Jimmy had married her for love. But was there not the assumption that she, of all women, might be satisfied with what he had to give? Had that, too, not been part of it?

  His father’s visit last night had further stirred these feelings. She had learned of Jimmy’s childhood over the years, gently wheedling out the story. She understood something of his hurt. It was easy to believe that he had been attracted to her because she symbolized in many ways the path not taken, the life in Japan he’d been forced to abandon.

  Little wrong in that. Men and women were attracted to each other for many reasons. Love had to begin somewhere.

  The acknowledgment of her feelings was freeing. She took a centering breath, let her hands have their way with the clay. Their marriage had been a bargain, as all marriages were. Was it not now unfair of her to change the unwritten rules?

  Unfair … yes. To Jimmy, whose love had so graciously opened a world she had never thought to experience. And this new land where uniqueness could be prized, her blindness a mere inconvenience. A universe where all things were possible. Did she not owe everything to him? And owing all, could she not justly be faulted for wanting more than was truly offered? For wanting it all. A normal life—a family.

  Jimmy’s reaction when she’d brought up the idea of a baby had stung. A wound she could only now bear to examine. Was it simply the pressures of this present case that had made him so unreceptive to even the thought of a child? Was it his own unhappy childhood? Was her place in his life to be nothing more than a companion for his loneliness, his vision for the two of them so circumscribed that it could not bear a third?

  Perhaps it would help her own confusion if she could confide in Willie. But Willie was Jimmy’s friend too. Confiding in her would seem like another betrayal. Like her friendship with Adrian … that kiss. She could hardly believe it had happened. The memory of it still pierced her with shame.

  Jimmy loves me. The thought was a prayer, unfolding in her mind the countless times her husband’s gentleness and encouragement had warmed her. His kindnesses beyond words. She felt heartened in these memories, her doubts and fears half foolish.

  I love him. The other half-equation.

  She closed her eyes, fighting the headache that threatened, reaching for that illumination that was her inner vision. It would be difficult to express to Jimmy these things that troubled her. But she must have the courage, a belief in the strength of their marriage. The baby she carried was a fact.

  She sat for long moments, willing a silence into her mind, a resting place for heart and will to gather. She was surprised when she came to herself to find that her fingers had continued their work. But it was not her husband’s face that had formed beneath her hands.

  Pat Kelly could hear members of the task force and Crime Scene people upstairs. The ceiling overhead creaked and moaned with this surprise assault of moving bodies and equipment. An old soldier giving up the ghost. They were taking the St. Sebastian rectory a floor at a time. An army of officers attacking the enemy. Attic. Third. Second. First. Next was the basement in which Adelia Johnson and he now stood as the advance guard. The outbuildings would be last. The search warrant included everything, extended to the grounds. Precinct uniforms had been stationed outside to keep the neighborhood and press at bay.

  “Cold as a witch’s tit down here, Sergeant.” Johnson’s words came out in big puffs of frosted air. She rubbed her arms to get the circulation going.

  “Yeah.” If the attic had been secular, the basement was sacred. He looked around at the inventory of St. Sebastian’s past, discarded into heaps and piles, remnants of a time when saints were in and the Mass was said in Latin.

  “We’ll need some light,” said Johnson.

  His eyes moved up to the row of stained-glass panes at ground level. With sunlight filtering through, he could imagine the blue-and-red diamond patterns erasing some of the gloom. Today the bleak December weather leached all color from the room.

  “This place gives me the creeps.” Johnson was examining a life-size plaster statue. A thin fracture ran down the forehead across the cheek to the jaw, splitting the face into uneven halves. She turned. “You Catholic, Kelly?”

  “Not anymore.” He watched dust motes spiral in a shaft of weak light, thinking of the last time he’d been to Mass. Somebody’s funeral. He’d left before Communion and gotten drunk on his own wine.

  “I’m Baptist and I sure as hell don’t understand this stuff.” She nodded toward the statue. “Who’s this woman?”

  He moved to where his partner stood. His latexed hand wiping away a tangle of cobweb that attached itself to the neck and shoulder. “I think that’s St. Lucy.” Once, he’d known all the saints. In his altar boy days.

  “Why is she holding eyes?”

  “They’re her eyes.”

  “She was born with two pairs of eyes? No wonder she was a saint.”

  Kelly laughed. “The statue is St. Lucy once she got to Heaven. The eyes in the plate are the ones she had on Earth.”

  “Why is she holding eyes, Kelly?”

  “Shit, Delia, I ain’t the pope. I think it had to do with her not wanting to give it up, and the jerk took out her eyes. That happened a lot.”

  “What? Catholic ladies not wanting to give it up?”

  “Yeah, the Church is full of virgins.”

  “Well, Sergeant, that was then and this is now.”

  “What you saying, woman? That there ain’t no more Catholic virgins?”

  Delia’s whole body shook as she l
aughed. She patted St. Lucy’s rear end. “You go, girl.”

  “We’re ready to come down, Sergeant.”

  “Okay, Miles. You gonna need extra lights.”

  For over an hour CSU techs and task force officers took apart the basement. Everything was moved by section, according to a grid, carefully examined and cataloged. Hymnals, altar cloths, collection plates, glass votives, brass candelabra. The bowl of a marble baptismal font photographed and scraped for a questionable stain. A sample of holy water taken, a cake of Benediction incense bagged. The Infant Jesus of Prague and St. Jude, Patron of Impossible Cases, dusted for fingerprints. Nothing was spared.

  “Hey, Sarge, you better get over here. I think we got something.”

  Kelly turned, saw Miles and another tech standing in a corner; a pile of blankets, like a mountain of old wool, was gathered near their feet.

  “What you got?” he said, walking over, his focus directed toward Miles Turner’s pointing finger. He looked down. Against the faded deep blue of the blanket, something gold winked like a tiny star in the arc lights.

  Dominick Mancuso peered out the window of the brownstone, where his wife and children had lived quietly for the last twelve years, his father and mother for thirty-odd years before that. No one lived here quietly anymore.

  The street for now was silent, though, the press people having given up for a while. The phone was silent too. The ringer turned off until the number could be changed to something unlisted. The message light blinked steadily, demanding that he wade through the voice mail for the legitimate calls from family and friends. Though they could be worse than the press, trading on their closeness for the secret thrill, as if, as the father of the murdered child, he had an insider’s knowledge. As if the police told him much of anything.

  Today was Thursday, less than a week since … He had no words for the black void that had swallowed up his life. Monday, he would return to his job as a foreman. He looked forward to what could be salvaged in routine, to an escape from this house. But he dreaded work too, for the awkwardness of every fresh encounter with his men. How long before anyone could feel free to laugh in his presence? How long before his own laughter might not be harshly judged? By himself, if not by others?

  Truth was, he could not imagine a time when he would feel anything at all through the sucking blackness. He knew he could not feel love. Not for his wife, who lay upstairs in a haze of sedatives and grief. Not for Celia, packing in her room for the few days’ escape to his brother’s house in Queens. He could act on the strength of the love he remembered. He could show concern, a rough compassion that meant getting what was left of his family through the day. He could feel nothing. Perhaps if he could want to love, but that desire was gone too, ripped out by the monster who had killed his child, by a God who would allow it.

  He walked to the table where he’d earlier thrown the newspaper. What was the point of anything, when the priest who heard your confession might be the killer who murdered your baby and hung her as a decoration in his church? He had thought there could be no more surprises, but the cover story in this morning’s Post, naming Father Thomas Graff as the prime suspect in the murders, had still shaken him, despite the rumors he had already heard that the assistant pastor was under suspicion by the police. Shocking too that Agnes Tuminello, of all people, would give such an interview.

  At least his brother-in-law had been cleared. He might hate the man’s guts, might still want to smash his face, but there had been enough tragedy in the family without his sister’s husband being named the killer. Barbara for some reason loved the man, so perhaps it was also true that Tony had never touched the neighbor’s child. He hoped that was the case for Barbara’s sake.

  But what about Graff? Sophia had been crazy about the priest and had asked him here for dinner more than once. Could the man really be what Agnes Tuminello had said in the paper? An abomination? A viper they had nurtured? Had he invited into his own home the killer of his daughter? If he could still pray, he’d pray it wasn’t so.

  He tore up the front page, wadding it for the trash. He wanted no chance that Celia or Sophia would see it. Not that it was likely. Celia stayed in her room. And his wife had not watched TV or read any of the papers. Sophia expressed as little interest in the police investigation as she did in anything else. He doubted she’d remember tomorrow’s funeral. Her condition was one of the reasons he’d agreed to let Celia stay with her cousins through the weekend. His remaining daughter needed the company of other people, a house that was normal. Monday, he would send her back to school.

  The doorbell rang and he stiffened. Another reporter? Or perhaps it was only his brother coming to pick up Celia. But when he looked through the glass, a young man and a black woman stood on his porch, the woman holding up a badge.

  “This is Detective Talbot,” she said as he opened the door, “and I’m Adelia Johnson. We’re sorry to have to bother you, Mr. Mancuso.”

  “No. Come in, please.” He stepped back to let them pass. “You have some news?”

  “We may have found something,” the black woman said. She had put the badge away and now held out a small plastic bag. Inside was a necklace. Gold with a pendant heart. The implication was clear, they believed the thing was Lucia’s.

  “Where did you find that?” he asked.

  “I’d rather not say just now.” The black woman smiled. “Can you tell me if you’ve seen it before?”

  “I’m not sure,” he answered honestly.

  “Perhaps your wife?” the male officer suggested.

  He shook his head. Celia with her packed knapsack had come into the room. “Come here, CeCe,” he said to her. Better than waking Sophia.

  His daughter moved slowly, her eyes huge in her face. Celia looked scared, which had never been her reaction to the police.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked her.

  “Nothing, Papa.” Her voice was nearly inaudible, her gaze locked on the plastic bag in the officer’s outstretched hand.

  “Do you recognize this?” The policewoman pressed it forward.

  The seconds went by. Celia didn’t answer.

  “CeCe,” he prompted her, “is that your sister’s necklace?”

  The policewoman’s eyes flashed a warning, but he didn’t care. He wanted this over.

  “Would you like to look at the locket more closely?” She reached for Celia’s hand, placed the bag into her palm.

  He watched as his daughter swallowed visibly, her fingers curling, pressing against the plastic to the tiny heart, where he now saw the letter M was engraved.

  “Is it Lucia’s?” He heard his voice harsh, his grief lashing out in impatience.

  The policewoman sighed. There was another long moment when nothing happened. Then Celia’s head began to nod, a marionette motion of short, sharp jerks.

  “Yes, Papa”—her lips trembled over the words—“that’s Lucia’s locket.”

  “Is Crime Scene still at St. Sebastian’s?” Michael Darius stood at the window of his apartment, looking out at the hard gray evening.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Willie answered from the sofa. “The techs are going over that corner quadrant where they found the necklace inch by inch, looking for hair, fiber, DNA evidence. Anything they can find.”

  “I guess the locket has kicked things up a notch.” Darius turned to her.

  “More than a notch.” She sipped on the wine he had poured.

  “It sounds like a witch-hunt to me.” Darius had moved away from the window.

  “That’s not fair, Michael,” she snapped. “You saw the Graff video.”

  He shrugged. “Not much moved me.”

  “Shit, Michael, this isn’t voodoo.” She set her glass down.

  “And profiling’s a science, Dr. French?”

  She looked at him and laughed. “Touché. But you’ll have to admit that finding Lucia’s locket does make things look worse for the priest.”

  Darius slumped next to her on the sofa.r />
  “It would have been easy for Graff to lure her into the rectory,” she said. “Lucia passed the place going to and from the drugstore. She knew the priest. He’d had dinner with her family. She’d feel comfortable with him.”

  He shrugged, reaching for his wine.

  “Graff could hardly murder her in her own bed,” she went on, “or in his rooms. The rectory basement provided the privacy he needed—a place to hold her until he could take her into the church. The basement helps to explain how and why things happened the way they did. Transporting Lucia any great distance would have been awkward at best.”

  “Now it’s convenient.” He almost laughed.

  “Think,” she said, refusing to be intimidated. “If you’re a priest making angels, which setup would more likely fulfill your fantasy—a bedroom or a church? If we accept that serials work up to speed, accept that they embroider on their fantasies, then suspending a body in a church would have to be more gratifying. This may be where Graff was heading all along. Working his way up to the church.”

  “But why a little girl?” Darius asked her now. “Why not another homosexual?”

  She looked at him, remembering how it had felt when he’d kissed her the other night. How being with him was not like anything she’d ever experienced. Something incredible and frightening at the same time. He caught her staring. She looked away.

  “I have another theory.” She hated the way that sounded.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Perhaps it’s not the sexual orientation of his victims that interests the killer,” she said, “but their appearance. None of the male victims were decidedly masculine. A change of clothing and hair—”

  “Lucia was a very pretty eight-year-old girl,” he interrupted.

  “So were Carrera and Westlake—pretty,” she said. “And Jude Pinot. Kerry and Milne less so. But all of them had appearances that could be sexually ambiguous.” She paused. Then, “Lucia hadn’t reached puberty. She was undeveloped. No breasts. Thin. Angular. Short hair. Lucia Mancuso could easily be mistaken in the right circumstances for a very attractive young boy.”