“Yeah, your job had a few perks.” Riker looked down at his notebook of illegible ciphers. “More than just the pretty hookers. You milked the church for a pricey education. Wound up with a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Is that why you signed up for the priesthood? The free ride?”
Father DuPont did not take offense, but he took his time. Running his options? In Mallory’s experience, truth came quickly. Lies took longer.
“A free education—then ditch the church? Yes, that was my original plan.”
It was rare for New York City detectives to be taken by surprise when it came to confessions. Well, Riker was surprised. Mallory was only suspicious. This was too damn easy.
“But Angie changed all of that,” said the priest. “She changed me.”
Mallory folded her arms in a silent comment of Yeah, right—just to let him know that charm and bullshit was not a good game plan tonight. The priest sat up a bit straighter to say he got her meaning, clear as a gunshot to the head. A waiter appeared at his side to exchange the empty wineglass for one that was full. Fresh anesthetic. DuPont sipped it—leisurely. Stalling again.
“Here’s something your research won’t tell you—because I never got caught. I wasn’t a very nice guy in my younger days.” All the nicely modulated tones of higher learning had fallen away. “Tell me about the worst screwup you ever knew, and that was me. Selling dope, snatching purses, you name it. Breaking commandments was like a hobby with me. . . . I was no virgin altar boy when I entered the seminary.”
“You slept with her,” said Mallory, as if he had fed her these words. Had he?
“Not when she was a kid,” said DuPont. “I never touched her then. Did I love the girl? Yes. But Angie and me . . . we were a twisted pair. She never loved one man she screwed. By her code, she could only do it for money. . . . So I paid her . . . because I loved her.”
“She seduced you?”
“No, it just happened. . . . In psych circles, we call it transference. . . . But that’s not it, not all of it. I was the one who came on to her . . . when she was seventeen.”
Finally, Mallory was surprised. What was the priest’s angle for this confession?
—
EIGHT YEARS AGO, a large flat-panel television had replaced the long mirror on the wall of Iggy Conroy’s front room. The matte material of the plasma screen reflected nothing but dull points of light when lamps were lit.
Tonight, he stood before the mirror over his bathroom sink, the only one left after the purge, a wild night of breaking every looking glass in the house. Instead of destroying this one eight years ago, he had blacked out his reflection with a coat of paint on the medicine cabinet’s door. Mirrors were traps for things—like the thing that had once passed for his dead mother. On the shelf above the sink was Ma’s old plastic compact for face powder. Its round mirror was so small it could only capture his own skin when he shaved—nothing behind him, nothing scary.
Iggy passed through the doorway to enter his bedroom, and he raised the window sash to let in the breeze from his backyard. When had he ever been so tired? He had little red pills to keep him awake, but he would not trust any drug to make him sleep, no pills that could dull his brain to noise of an intruder, nothing to slow down his reflexes. Ah, but the mistakes, the loose ends that had cost him sleep were all behind him now. The reporters were pitching the old man’s drowning as a suicide. The cops had nothing.
He closed the window and locked it. The scent of roses remained in the room with him as he laid himself down on the side of the bed that was closest to the door. Angie had slept on the side by the window. In those days, the girl had her own key to the house so she could come to him when she needed money—and go away again days later, or only hours afterward, whenever she had earned enough to suit her.
Not his typical arrangement with whores.
Sometimes she had shown up late at night, off the last bus out of New York City. Over time, she had dulled his instinct to reach for a gun when the mattress dipped on her side of the bed. And maybe he could backtrack all his mistakes to that first one—giving her a key, putting that kind of trust in a whore.
—
PEOPLE LINGERED in the restaurant after closing time. The manager pulled down the shades on the street window, and ashtrays were carried to the tables that were still occupied, signaling that the smoking lamp was illegally lit. Little fires from matches and lighters flared up all around the room. The priest, solidly behind this outlaw activity, fired up a cigar and then handed a credit card to the waiter, saying, “A round of drinks for my friends.”
Riker pulled out his pack of cigarettes and lit up, always happy to smoke, happier to drink.
Mallory left her listening device under a cocktail napkin as she rose from her chair. She walked toward a customer seated at a nearby table, a man whose three-piece suit outclassed even the priest’s fine tailoring. And Charles Butler had other outstanding features. The small blue irises afloat in the whites of a frog’s eyes, heavy-lidded and bulging, gave him a perpetually startled look. Oh, but the large hooked nose was incomparable. It could roost a pigeon.
He saw her coming and gave her the wide smile of a simpleminded loon, belying his huge brain and a long string of graduate degrees. That unfortunate smile was another accident of birth. Charles’s face was simply made that way, and so he was forced to play the fool each time they met. He rose from his table, unfolding his well-made body to a height of six-four, and the quintessential gentleman pulled out a chair for her.
He was also a psychologist, but one with better skills than DuPont’s. Charles played the liars’ game of poker once a week, and it was only his famous blush that genetically kept him from winning by telling lies of his own. But no one in Mallory’s acquaintance was better at reading the poker tells that told Charles who was holding and who was running a bluff.
He pushed back his curly brown hair on one side to remove the earpiece that had allowed him to listen in on her conversation with the priest. In the role of police consultant, he had been invited here tonight because Mallory thought it might take a shrink to catch a shrink.
—
CHARLES BUTLER glanced at the table where Mallory’s partner drank and smoked with the suspect. Father DuPont, a fellow psychologist, had abandoned that profession years ago and without making any significant mark in the field.
“I read one paper he published. The subject was juvenile runaways, but nothing on child prostitution. It centered on—” He could see that he was losing Mallory’s interest. So on to the fruits of his eavesdropping—all that she really cared about. “I’m sure he did love Angie Quill. That part seemed very real to me. He covers the notch in his clerical collar when he’s being less than credible.” Even if he had not caught this gesture twice with Mallory’s early trip-up questions to net lies, it would have been a noticeable tell.
That priest would be dead meat in a poker game.
“I already know he lied about the girl’s age the first time he raped her,” said Mallory. “Too convenient that Angie Quill was seventeen.”
“Because he hesitated too long on that one? That’s not a liar’s tell, not for him. He also did that when he was being truthful. He was just trying to figure out what you wanted to hear. I guessed that when he confirmed every bad thing you thought of him . . . so you’d believe the truth as well.” That had not been a good strategy for dealing with Mallory, who also practiced the art of mixing truth with lies. Her toolkit for deceit was extraordinary. Poor priest, he had no idea with whom he was dealing.
Though it was always risky to oppose her point of view, Charles said, “I suspect DuPont of behaving decently. Nothing carnal at all. I think he lied about that part. I do believe he cared for the girl. But apparently, Angie Quill only loved God.”
Mallory gave him a look that said, No sale. “You’re feeding me the saintly priest routine? That’s as bogus as the
hooker with a heart of gold, and I didn’t buy that one, either.”
“Too cliché?” He would concede that a one-sided love affair for the priest had been perhaps too fanciful. Charles had fashioned it upon his own scatterbrained heart that had never loved wisely. “You’re right. Obviously DuPont’s no saint. He’s ambitious—that’s in the career track he’s chosen.”
“And he’s a liar,” she said. “What’s his plan here?”
“The child—finding that little boy. He’s playing to your sympathy.” Poor fool. “Toward that end, he would’ve told you anything you wanted to hear. Not necessarily the truth, but what you wanted. So he painted himself in the worst possible light. Not a bad strategy if he—”
“He’s worked with lots of kids,” said Mallory. “If he wanted to be convincing, he would’ve told me Angie seduced him. Even the baby hookers barter that way. She wanted help from him, and she got it. I say the girl was thirteen years old when she made the first move on the priest.”
“I see the problem.” Charles smiled. “You’re faulting the man for lying badly. Well, that’s fair. He is a pretender. But he only lied at his own expense—never hers. I’m sure, at some point, she did come on to him. Sex was currency for her. Nothing to do with transference. He lied about that. During counseling, her advances would’ve been a problem for—”
“Count on it. When Angie Quill checked into a monastery, who do you think she was hiding from?”
“Not the priest. He didn’t register any off notes on that point.” He could tell that she did not care for this observation. Always a mistake, when choosing up sides, to pick any side but hers. She seemed withdrawn for a moment, and so he was unprepared for the sudden anger. Mallory pulled a photograph from the pocket of her blazer and slammed it down on the table. Now Charles was staring at front and profile poses of a girl’s police mug shot. The bruised bare shoulder spoke to the violence of Angie Quill’s life on the street. The thick mascara was running. The girl had been crying when—
“I interviewed the mother,” said Mallory. “When Angie was a kid, there was no after-school job. DuPont lied about that, too. So this kid’s hustling johns for close to seven years. Her first arrest was a freebie, that much was true. An idiot cop just handed her over to the priest. She wasn’t much older in that mug shot—the only arrest on record. She never gets jailed again? Any idea of the odds on that? That’s how I know Angie had a steady customer. Half her brother’s college tuition came from a church scholarship. Angie paid the rest in cash. Then there’s the free day care for the nephew. Not a bad haul for a kid hooker.”
“So the steady customer could only be Father DuPont?” Yes, he could see that she was wedded to this theory. Unlike sainted clergy and hookers with golden hearts, a child-molesting priest was one cliché she was willing to believe in, and never would Mallory own a blind spot—her bias against the church. “All right.” He raised both hands in mock surrender. “Let’s say Father DuPont left out the part about ravaging a little girl.”
Oh, Mallory liked that.
“Right,” she said. “But if he really wanted sympathy for a hooker, he would’ve thrown that in. It’s not like a dead nun could file a police complaint.”
Excellent reasoning. But now for the caveat that would anger her again. “Would you ever believe he’d confess to child molestation . . . unless he was hiding something worse . . . like a link to her murder and a kidnapped boy? That priest might be a better liar than you think.”
Better than she was?
No, that was definitely unacceptable. He could see that in the slight jut of her jaw, but before she could speak, Charles said, “DuPont’s not shielding anyone, least of all himself. Logic, Mallory. Take his whole sorry story, truth and lies. This is his game—every word out of his mouth to one purpose. He can’t have you believing Angie was a trashy fit to everyone’s idea of a prostitute . . . even if she was. He needs you to be on her side . . . and the boy’s. So he made a false confession of bad acts—because he’s a man of deep conscience.”
Mallory stared at Charles, as if she had just found him guilty of all the priest’s supposed crimes. “You like DuPont. . . . I have to wonder why.”
Oh, fine. Now he was suspect in a conspiracy to thwart her. Did this surprise him? Well, no. It took suspicion on the grand scale, a truly gifted paranoid, to make such a leap. She was all that and more—so cold when she rose from the table and walked away, the back of her accusing him.
Of what?
—
CHARLES BUTLER punched an inoffensive down pillow.
The hour was late, but his eyes were wide open, and a book lay on the far side of the room where he had flung it in a bibliophile’s act of heresy—and frustration.
He turned out the light.
Over the course of a lie-awake night, he mangled his bedsheets and gave more thought to all the evidence Mallory had laid out for him. On balance, he considered his own counterpoints, which contained no such factual basis, only supposition and poker tells. And then, upon reconsidering paranoia as an aspect of her final words, he sat bolt upright in bed.
She knew!
Mallory had worked it out, but how?
Before setting him up for her parting shot, there must have been a point when she suspected him of—
No, wait.
Perhaps he was only being paranoid.
—
THE MOON WAS RIDING HIGH over Iggy Conroy’s house. Ma’s old knee-high troll crouched in its place on the front lawn. It was not like other people’s garden gnomes. The eyes were dark sockets, the mouth set in a snarl, and its pose was a forever-waiting game, waiting for the thing to spring at him, to get him. Only one garden shop sold them on special order from a twisted artist, who must believe that there was a market for tense, ugly lawn decorations.
Armed with a sledgehammer, Iggy came up behind the little stone man and—Bang!—the head went rolling off to his left. Bang! The torso broke into pieces, dropping an arm here, an arm there. Lowering his hammer and holding the handle like a golf club, he made a mighty swing, and a crooked leg broke in two, half of it flying across the grass. He should have done this years ago, after Ma was dead and long past missing the scary little dude with the pointed ears.
Iggy laid himself down on the dew-wet lawn. No sooner had he closed his eyes than he felt a great weight on his chest. Hard to breathe. His ribs hurt so bad.
The troll was on top of him, whole again, straddling him, squeezing his sides with stone thighs. But Iggy could not lift his hands to fend it off; he had gone to stone himself. He could only watch. Ribs aching, close to breaking. Heart beating wild. Sipping air, all that he could get, then nothing, not a breath. Panic time! And then—
Everything changed.
He was back in his bed. The pain was gone. Pain in a damn dream! Gone was the garden gnome. Only a nightmare. That little stone freak was still out there on the front lawn, still all of a piece and crouching in the dark.
Iggy rose from the mattress and walked through the rooms of his house, turning on all the lights.
9
The shingled red roof sloped down to eaves of floral lacework. Tulips were carved into the window shutters and the front door. And the air was thick with the scent of roses. Iggy Conroy’s house of flowers was neither too big nor too small, but just right, as Ma used to say, parroting Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Most of her old sayings had come from scarier fairy tales, and the land was decorated with small statues of creatures from his childhood nightmares. They crouched behind bushes and trees, lying in wait for bad children, so said Ma.
He had no firm count on the number of garden gnomes she had acquired. All these years later, he could still be surprised to find one hiding in the foliage. They looked alike, evil little bastards with nasty mouths, and they were widely spaced around the property to create the illusion that there was only one ugly stone man who moved
about on his own. And so, this pale-yellow stucco house would have fit well in the neighborhood of the Brothers Grimm.
A long driveway wound through encroaching woodland, and it was a fight to keep the creep of foliage from reclaiming that dirt road. Every summer, Iggy fought back with a machete, hacking off new growth that would scratch the paint on his van if he allowed it to live. Most people in the area hired out this work, but he liked his privacy.
Like mother, like son.
Even before the move to the country, Ma had always favored pit bulls to ensure her own peace and quiet. One day, while out walking, she had met fellow churchgoers, the elderly couple on the next plot of land. They had stopped her on the road to ask the name of her dog. “Silly question,” she had said to them. “Who names a weapon?” After that, all the neighbors had learned not to stop by. Separated by acres of land, they probably believed that his mother still lived here, though her church attendance had slacked off in the nine years since her death.
Angie had been the only visitor in all that time—and now her nephew, who sat in an armchair only a few feet away from the discarded machete that oozed with the blood of young plants. Iggy wiped sweat from his face and sipped his beer as he watched the boy’s blind fingers tracing the raised pattern on the chair’s upholstery.
And when the kid had figured it out, he said, “A tulip.”
“Yeah, they’re all over the place.” In every room, there were vases holding plastic tulips and wooden ones, and some were made of silk. “My mother was never much good with live flowers.” They had always died on her. With the onset of dementia near the end of her days, Moira Conroy had believed that this was her dark power over all living things. “But Ma was a fool for tulips.”
And with Angie it was roses.
Any burglar to survive the dog’s welcome might believe that a woman lived here. This feminine construct was more than shelter to Iggy—this illusion of the women and their company.
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