The Assassini (13 page)

She smiled at the thought of telling Sister Val about the afternoon, getting her interpretation of the cardinal’s tour. Saint Jack. Maybe the next pope …

And then Saint Jack took her hand in his great meaty paws, held her gently to keep her from breaking, and told her that Sister Valentine had been murdered.

I
sat in the hospital coffee shop and tried to figure out what was going on.

There was a television set in the corner and the story of the murders of Curtis Lockhardt and Monsignor Andrew Heffernan was getting a big play but the newscaster from the
Today
show had precious little to tell. I knew enough about the way the archdiocese worked to see the lid being slammed down, hammered into place. The NYPD had issued a statement four sentences in length. So the meat of the story was a quickly cobbled together obituary of Lockhardt and a brief recap of Heffernan’s career.

The news of Sister Valentine’s murder hadn’t yet surfaced. It would soon enough, and I could imagine the television commentators putting two and two together. Getting four wasn’t going to take a rocket scientist.

I stared out the coffee shop window at the Halloween world, looking past the decorations done by children who were patients, all the orange and black witches on broomsticks and grinning pumpkins. The more I thought about it, I seemed to see something grim and implacably evil, like an army of Vandals or Goths gathering on the horizon. Yet there was only a stand of stark-limbed trees, windshorn, a desperately inadequate windbreak out past the parking lot. But in my mind the ghostly, nameless enemy was gathering beyond those sorry trees. My sister had been caught in the Church’s dirty work. The Church had just started screwing around with my life. Again.

A pair of doctors who had known my father forever
finally came to the coffee shop stroking their chins like actors trying out for
Magnificent Obsession
. My father had suffered the standard massive heart attack you’re always reading about. It didn’t look good. But then, it could have looked worse. Mainly it was a waiting game. And for the moment they were worried about controlling press coverage, deflecting the possibility that the hospital might become a circus of reporters waiting to see if Hugh Driskill was packing it in. The hospital staff didn’t know my sister had been killed and I wasn’t going to get into that. They could hear about it like everyone else. About noon I left the doctor place, as Val had called the hospital when she was little, and drove through the hardening slush until I was home.

The couple working for my father, the Garritys, was on hand full of awkward comfort. I’d called them from the hospital, told them the sad story, and they’d come to do some cooking and straightening in case any guests slept over. They did a ham and turkey and God knew what else and then they were gone and I was alone. I made some other necessary calls, to my office and to my father’s. When I got off the phone I was more alone than I’d ever been.

Late afternoon and the gray light was fading fast. I sat in the Long Room without the inclination to turn on the lamps or light the carefully laid logs in the dark fireplace. I was sifting through the jumbled events of the past twenty-four hours like a prospector peering for the glint of gold winking at him from all the false hopes. Then something struck me.

I went upstairs, stood looking down the dim hallway toward Val’s bedroom, where the door stood open. I’d called Sam Turner from the hospital to tell him about my father. Sam said he had the crime-scene guys coming out to the house in the morning. The Garritys told me that they had indeed clumped around out in the chapel and gone through the house, but I saw no evidence of their efforts. The door to Val’s room stood open. Had they gone through everything she’d brought home with her?

I was trying to fix on something. The golden wink, the hidden jewel in the slag which might draw one on.

The hallway, long and dark and profoundly quiet, seemed like the deserted gallery of a museum devoted to unidentifiable, half-remembered, repressed images and experiences, memories of my mother, unanswerable questions: why she’d died as she had, what it was she’d been trying to say when she’d reached out to me, the rings weighing so heavily on her trembling fingers … It was a museum of disappointment, whispered questions without answers, as if only bits and pieces of the paintings were visible within the frames and you were supposed to guess what the finished picture might actually represent. Our home had always been a puzzle museum, a palace of indirection where nothing was quite what you’d thought. I’d lived in the house and had never really known what was going on and now Val was dead, my father was dying, I was alone, and I didn’t understand it any better than I had so long ago.

An hour later I stood in Val’s bedroom with the contents of two suitcases spread out on the bed. A couple of skirts, sweaters, blouses, a wool dress, underwear, toiletries, cosmetics, stockings, knee socks, a pair of loafers, a pair of heels, jeans, wool slacks, two paperback copies of Eric Ambler novels, a small leather jewelry box …

I had searched every drawer, gone through the closet, looked under the mattress. I stood in the middle of the room, starting to sweat. There was something impossibly wrong.

There was no briefcase. No notebooks. Not a pad of paper, not a pen. Not a single sheet of notes. No diary, no weekly planner. No address book. But most of all—no briefcase. Years before I had given her a heavy Vuitton briefcase with a brass lock. It had become a permanent part of her daily life. She’d said it was one of those perfect things, like a Rolex or a perfectly balanced Waterman pen or an IBM Selectric. Her indestructible Vuitton briefcase. It was usually packed to bulging and it was always with her. I simply didn’t believe she’d neglected to bring it home. She was writing a book. She’d
never have gone anywhere, let alone home, without that briefcase. She might have left cartons of research material in an office in Rome … but the briefcase would have been with her, just this side of manacled to her wrist.

And it was gone. Someone had taken it.…

It was past six o’clock, dark as a lost soul, when I put down the telephone in the Long Room and lit the fire. My father’s condition was unchanged. He hadn’t regained consciousness! The doctor was blandly noncommittal and said he was awfully sorry about my sister. Word was getting about.

The flames took hold, licked at the dry bark, curled around the kindling and the thick logs. I sank back in the deep chair my father had used the night before: I felt his presence all around me. I smelled his cigars mingling with the woodsy smoke smell from the fireplace. In the shadows at the end of the room stood his easel, the draped painting he’d been working on. The sound of a car in the forecourt roused me from my reflections. The glare of headlights poked through the window.

I opened the front door and Father Dunn came in, followed by a sudden gasp of chill wind. He looked rumpled and calm, a comfortable man who fit in because he was never much aware of himself. The familiarity of his face was something intrinsic, not just manufactured from the dust jackets of his books.

He shucked off his trench coat. He was wearing his black clericals, the collar. “How’s your father?”

“No change,” I said. “But how do you know?” I stopped abruptly on the way into the Long Room and he passed me, dropped his coat over one of the wooden chairs at the table.

“Cardinal Klammer. You called him, right?”

“He’d just spoken with my father, telling him about Lockhardt and Heffernan, then it happened.”

“Well, I’ve spent several hours with Klammer, trying to keep him from running naked onto Fifth Avenue screaming he had no part in any of it. His Eminence and Lockhardt were not pals, you see. So he sees himself as a suspect in that cute, paranoid way he has. Klammer, of
course, lives in the sixteenth century, when men were men. You wouldn’t have a wee drop of that Laphroaig?” I poured it over ice and he drained off half of it. “So, Klammer’s not leading the mourners, but murder practically in his parlor does call for a quick change of underwear.” Dunn smiled for a moment. I poured myself a drink. “I told him about Sister Valentine. I really had to—I daresay she’d have gotten a kick out of his reaction. Our archbishop cardinal put on his game face, gritted his teeth … as the immortal Wodehouse might have said, Klammer’s face was that of a sheep with a secret sorrow. He actually said, ‘Why me, O Lord, why me?’ A bellyaching Teutonic nitwit through and through. I have a bit of news, Ben. I’ve had a busy day.”

“What is it you actually
do
?” I said. “For the Church?”

“Today I did a whole lot of listening. And I’m a good listener. After Klammer I went to see the cop in charge of the murder investigation in New York—Randolph Jackson, I’ve known him for twenty years. He had some things to say …” He gave me one of his sharp looks, all gimlet eye and eyebrow like a privet hedge gone to rack and ruin. “May I trouble you for a cigar?” I nodded impatiently while he clipped and lit it, blew out a jet of smoke. “A thing like this, it looks impossible, two bodies at the Palace—what can you do? Well, Jackson started talking to people at the scene. And it leads back to your sister, Ben—you got your seat belt buckled?”

“Leads back to my sister,” I said. The Vandals and the Goths were moving closer, faster.

“A secretary working for Heffernan saw the killer.” He watched me while that sunk in. “She was down the hall programming a computer for him and she had some questions; she started down the hall to the penthouse suite. She saw this guy come out of Heffernan’s door and go to the elevator. She couldn’t get an answer to her buzz, she called on the phone—finally she just went in and got the surprise of her life.”

“So? The killer?”

“She says he was a priest.” He broke into a dour
grin, like a man delivering the worst punch line in the world.

“A priest. Or a man dressed like a priest—”

“She says she can always tell a priest—she’s worked for the diocese for thirty-five years. She’s a nun.”

“Aren’t there any Protestants left in the world?”

“Not in this story, I’m afraid.”

The wind came up hard against the windows and a flurry of drafts filled the room, shoving the curtains. The fire flared.

“She’s absolutely sure,” Dunn said. “But she says she can’t identify him. Or describe him, really. She says all priests look alike to her. Except for his hair. This was an elderly man with silver hair.”

“How to find him in New York?” I shook my head. Hopeless.

“Well, he’s not in New York. He was here yesterday. I think he killed your sister, Ben.”

My face was clammy. “I thought about it today. Three Catholics. The hat trick. It had to be the same operation.”

“There was something in the chapel last night … you had it in your hand, you didn’t even know it. Piece of fabric, torn on the back of a pew. I knew what it was. Today proved it.”

He took something out of his pocket, dangled it before me. A small piece of black fabric. I said, “I don’t get it.”

“It’s a piece torn from a raincoat. A black raincoat. I’ve seen a million of ’em. A priest’s raincoat. I’m like that old nun. I’d know one anywhere.”

Peaches called, insisting we come over to the St. Mary’s parish house in New Prudence for dinner. He wouldn’t take no for an answer.

I rode with Dunn in his Jaguar. When we reached New Pru, countless pint-sized goblins and ghosts and skeletons were out trick-or-treating. Parents waited on the sidewalks as their kids traipsed back and forth, house to house, clutching Mars bars and popcorn balls and little
sacks of cookies. It was windy, misting faintly, the night full of shouts and screams.

Edna Hanrahan, Peaches’s housekeeper, let us in the front door of the old Victorian house with its long windows and wrought iron fence and gabled roof. Peaches had just returned from a hayride with the parish kids. What ensued in the church basement was a kind of pandemonium I hadn’t seen since I was a kid. Peaches was riding herd on the eight- to twelve-year-old kids, raucous, pink-cheeked, hysterical at their in jokes. Peaches had straw in his hair and was sneezing from the dust and looked like a commercial for the priesthood. He draped his arm around my shoulder. “Have a rotten day?”

“No, thanks,” I said, “just had one.”

We’d been making the same joke all our lives and he grinned sadly. His eyes were full of sympathy and history. “How’s your dad?” Everybody seemed to know.

“It’s a waiting game. He’s not dead, anyway.”

Peaches went off to get through the party. Pretty young mothers helped out, getting the apple bobbing going, opening casseroles and putting the franks into the buns and the potato chips into bowls. Dunn and I met at the hot dogs and loaded up, stood munching, watching the kids raising hell. Peaches had a touch with them, like a good teacher or coach. Finally Father Dunn couldn’t resist the insistent requests by a ten-year-old blonde with pigtails: she led him over to the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, blindfolded him, and giggled merrily as he set off in search of the donkey.

Peaches came over and said, “Let’s go outside, Ben. I need a break.” We went onto the back lawn of St. Mary’s which led away down toward a tumbling creek. The moon ducked in and out behind dark, gray-rimmed clouds and the mist was cold on my face. Peaches kicked at the crusty leaves poking out of the brittle, shallow snow.

“I’m not up for this party,” he said. “Occupational hazard. The priest at St. Mary’s has always done it, so this one will, too. You saw how much the kids enjoy it.”

“You’ve got a way with them,” I said.

“I do, I really do.” The windows of the church basement shone brightly and I could hear the kids laughing, shouting. “Val and I would have had great kids, Ben.”

I nodded. Nothing to say.

“Goddammit, why couldn’t she just have gone straight? She’d be alive now. I’m a real half-assed priest, Ben. Gone as far as I can go, not like Artie Dunn in there, no big-deal pals in Rome, no inside dope. This is it for me … but I’d have been a good husband. A great father. Dammit. We’d have had a lot of laughs and been happy and we’d have grown old together. But instead she’s dead and I’m running a Halloween party for other people’s kids.” He wiped a corner of an eye. “Sorry, Ben. I had to say all this to somebody.”