Chameleon (2 page)

She made no sound.

Her lack of response did not discourage him. “Yessir,” he continued, “it wasn’t even St. Leo’s. Was a franchise or a mission or something like that. Called Guadalupe—Our Lady of Guadalupe. Only one or two white families there when I was growin’ up. Hell—’scuse me, Sister—but Guadalupe doesn’t even exist anymore. Hell, St. Leo’s hardly exists any more.

“Geez, we used to go from church—Perpetual Help services—over to the old Olympia. Hell, the Olympia is gone, too. Red Wings—Howe, Lindsay, Abel—the Production Line. Jack Adams, best damn coach in history. Jack was a good Catholic too.” He looked at her in his rearview mirror. “I’m a Catholic, ya know, Sister.”

“I would never have guessed.” Her attention then abandoned him. She became lost in thought: Was now the time to quit?

“Geez, Sister, I’ll never forget one priest we had at old Guadalupe: Famer Paddock—a good man he was—gone, now, I guess. This was a pretty quiet neighborhood most times back then, except on Saturday nights. Then all hell would break loose. I remember old Father Paddock telling me one day that he stopped one of the black guys in the parish and asked him if the neighborhood could keep the noise down on Saturday nights ’cause on Sunday he had to work and he needed some peace and quiet on Saturday nights to get ready for Sunday Mass. And this guy says to him, ‘Father, if you ever was a black man on Saturday night, you would never want to be a white man again.’”

She didn’t laugh, But then, nuns, as he remembered them, were a quiet lot.

She had thought that when it was time to quit, she’d know it. Now, suddenly, out of nowhere, she was overwhelmed by a growing certitude that this was it. It had nothing directly to do with tonight’s trick. He had been easy enough. Even, pound for pound, a gentleman. No, her concern was that she had been pushing her luck, The odds, if you will. Countless occasions of extreme danger … she had been saved by something. Something beyond her power to control. What? Prayer? She smiled. Whatever it was, she sensed that it was running pretty thin lately. The last thing she wanted was to end up on a slab in the medical examiner’s emporium.

“So, there we were, Sister,” the cabbie rattled on, “me and this friend of mine helpin’ this guy sell newspapers outside the Olympia. The deal was, after we helped this guy, he would move us inside where he told the ticket taker that we worked for him and we were gonna sell papers inside, and when they were all sold he’d see to it that we left. But”—laughter—”that wasn’t how it worked, Sister. Nah, we’d go in, leave the papers on the floor inside, and then go see the show,” He shook his head, pleased at the memory.

“This one night it was wrestling, with Primo Carnera.…” He looked at her in his rearview mirror again. “He was the former heavyweight boxing champ, y’know.

“Anyway, it was a pretty good show. A fake of course, but a good show anyway. Then, after all the matches were over, I started walkin’ home all by myself. And then, under a streetlight, I see these two guys waitin’ on either side of the sidewalk. Well, I decided to go right ahead and right between them. But when I got to them, the bigger guy—he was lots bigger’n me and black to boot—anyway, he steps up and says, ‘What’s your name, boy?’

“So I says,’Teddy.’

“And he says, ‘Well my name is Joe Louis.’ And with that, he takes a swing at me—a roundhouse right.

“Well, I knew darn well he wasn’t Joe Louis—but I knew what he was gonna do next. So I ducked and got the hell out of there so fast they couldn’t have caught me, even if they’d been firing bullets. Man, I really moved.”

Still no sound from the nun. Well, maybe she’d fallen asleep. Hell, it was late enough. Matter of fact, after this fare, he was gonna go home and get some sleep himself.

It’s simply too late
, she thought;
I’m too tired to make a hard and fast decision about quitting right now.

But tomorrow, she’d give the idea a serious analysis. Yeah, that was it: Something as crucial as this demanded the light of day before any firm decisions were reached.

“Well, here we are, Sister.”

For the first time since their brief journey began, she was conscious the cab was not moving. “Oh?” She glanced out the window and recognized the familiar old, dirty gray buildings that had at one time, many decades earlier, constituted one of Detroit’s prestigious parishes. She rummaged through her purse. “Listen,” she told the cabbie, “wait for me here. I won’t be long.”

“Wait?! Are you kidding?”

“No, I’m not kidding. I want you to wait for me!” Testiness crept into her voice.

“Look, Sister, I don’t mind drivin’ you to this neighborhood, but I ain’t about to sit here like a duck waitin’ for somebody to step out of the shadows and off me.”

“What are you anyway, a lily-livered coward? Nobody’s gonna hurt you, little man.”

“No need to get on your high horse, Sister. I’m not arguing with you. I’m just tellin’ you I ain’t gonna wait for you, that’s all.”

She was furious, but said no more. She found her cash and peeled off just enough for the fare plus an infinitesimal tip.

He quickly tabulated the excess as she exited the cab. “Thanks a bunch, big spender,” he called out as he peeled away from the curb.

“Go to hell, you little son-of-a-bitch,” she murmured ineffectually as she watched him speed off.

It was bitter cold and her coat, while stylish, was not all that warm. She turned her collar up and pulled the lapels as high as they could be stretched. It gave her face and ears some little protection against the wind-whipped snow. She found her keys, turned, and headed for the darkened convent. God, it was cold! Her entire body shook.

She glanced up at the building, now entirely dark and deserted. She hadn’t planned on staying there this night. But now that the damn cabdriver had left, she had no choice. How was she going to get another cab to come to this neighborhood at this time of night? But of even more urgency was her need to get out of this frigid weather.

As she walked toward the convent, she recalled the vast number of nuns who had traversed this selfsame pavement over the years. Hundreds, probably. Undoubtedly, none of those nuns had actively chosen to be missioned to St. Leo’s. They had been sent. And they went. Obedience. There must have been in excess of twenty nuns here at any given time years ago. Now just one person inhabited this entire building. What a waste! How senseless!

Just the thought of the olden days when there were so many nuns living and working in buildings like this brought to mind the old joke—definitely dated now, when the legendary chockful of-nuns convents of the past no longer existed—about the repairman—Protestant—who was called to a convent to repair electrical outlets. He was taken to the site of the main problem—the convent’s living room. The nuns called it their common room. While he was working away, all the nuns entered the room to spend some quiet time before supper. Their order’s Rule demanded that at this hour they assemble together in absolute silence. And so they did.

The repairman observed this for the full hour they were together. Finally, the nuns left the room for dinner. Shortly thereafter, the repairman finished his work and left the convent. He went directly to the rectory where he met the parish priest. “Father, I’m not a Catholic, but I want to take instructions.”

“That’s nice,” said the priest, “But why?”

“I was just over at the convent doing some repairs,” the man replied, “and I figure there must be something to any religion that can put twenty women in the same room and for a full hour not one of them says a blasted word!”

She didn’t see him.

She would not have seen him even if she had been looking for him.

He’d been waiting in the shrubbery to one side of the convent steps. That gave him the cover of the bushes and the poor light further shrouded his presence.

As she passed by, he stepped out of the darkness behind her, gun in hand.

In one sweeping motion, he raised the gun to the base of her skull and fired.

She never knew what hit her. The bullet entered her head and tumbled in its unstructured path, tearing tissue as it went.

She fell in a heap like a marionette whose strings had been cut. She was motionless.

He pocketed the gun. Seizing her by the ankles, he dragged her, face down, toward the bushes. But the branches were too dense at the base to position the body beneath. He had not anticipated that.

He resumed dragging her, face downward, around the corner of the building and toward the rear of the large, front-lawn shrine. As he dragged, her head and arms flopped about grotesquely.

Here, out in the open, her body would be discovered earlier than he would have preferred. But there was nothing to be done about that now.

He pushed the body with his foot until it rested tight up against the slightly less than life-size crucifix. Under the circumstances, it was the best he could do. He looked about one last time and faded into the shadows.

Sister Joan Donovan was holding herself fairly well under control.

It was she who had found the body, the body of her sister Helen. Sister Joan had screamed repeatedly, piercingly, and in genuine horror. But that had been slightly more than two hours ago. Now, she was merely numb. And in her state of shock, she wondered vaguely why they wouldn’t leave her alone.

The janitor, in the process of opening the church, had heard her screams, found her at the shrine, saw the body, and called the police. Since then, she had been subjected to a barrage of questioning, first from the church people, then from the police officers.

By now, she was convinced that it didn’t really matter to any of them that she had suffered the loss of someone very near and dear to her. The police needed information and they were single-mindedly going to pursue every lead they could uncover.

She was seated in the front parlor of the convent. It was so chilly. The heat was on but so many people were entering and leaving by both the front and rear doors, too often leaving a door ajar as they came or went. She shivered, partly from shock and partly from the draft.

“Are you cold, Sister? Perhaps you’d better put on your coat. It is chilly in here.”

“I’m all right.” Joan focused on the woman nearby, seated on a chair that had been positioned between Joan and the front window by an earlier inquisitor. “Who are you?”

“My name is Moore, Sister; Sergeant Angie Moore. There are some questions I’ve got to ask you.”

“But I’ve already told the other officers everything I know about this … this tragedy.”

Moore nodded. “I know. But I’m with the Homicide Division. We’re going to be investigating this case and we’ll need your cooperation.”

“Oh …” Joan was unable to frame an objection.

“The deceased was your sister?”

Joan nodded.

“Her age?”

“She was thirty-eight … seven years younger than I.”

“Her occupation?”

“She was … self-employed.”

Moore shook her head. “She was a prostitute, wasn’t she, Sister?”

“If you know, why do you ask?”

“A matter of getting it on the record.”
And
, Moore added silently,
to see how you handle the question.
“Now, when your sister was found, she was wearing a religious habit … not unlike the one you’re wearing now.”

“It was identical to this. It was one of my habits.”

Moore raised an eyebrow.

“She asked to borrowit—just forlast evening,” Joan explained.

“This was unusual?”

“It was the first time she’d ever asked for that.”

“You didn’t object? Wasn’t it a rather odd request? Bizarre, even?”

“As a matter of fact, I did object … at first. But …”

“I should think you might object. But you did let her have it.”

“Helen usually got what she wanted.”

“Oh?”

“She’d stay on a request like a bulldog. Persistence was her long suit.”

“She say why she wanted the uniform?”

“She said she was going to a masquerade party.”

“You believed that?”

“Hardly. But the more I pressed her the more vague she became. She just kept after me until my resistance was worn thin.”

“She picked it up last night?”

Joan nodded. “I left her the key. I was going to be out—I’m out frequently in the evenings. My job—”

“Which is—?”

“I’m the delegate for religious.”

“And that means—?”

“I’m … uh … sort of an ombudsperson for members of religious orders in the archdiocese of Detroit. Mostly, I represent the other nuns here. So I have frequent meetings with individuals and groups, particularly in the evenings when all the aggrieved parties can get together.”

“And you were at such a meeting last night.”

“That’s right.” Without waiting for the next logical question, Joan continued. “I met with another nun—Sister Mary Murray—and the parish council at Our Lady of Refuge, Orchard Lake. There is some question about Sister’s contract as religious education coordinator,” she explained. “We met until midnight. I remember because the council president noted the time as the reason he wanted to end the meeting and take the matter up at next month’s meeting.”

She noted that the policewoman was taking notes employing some sort of shorthand. Joan was certain the sergeant would be checking every detail for corroboration.

“So,” Moore continued, “you would have returned here at about …?”

“It must have been near 1:00
A.M.
”

“Tell me—and please include every detail you can remember—what did you do when you arrived? You parked your car …”

“In the garage. There really isn’t anything significant to tell. It had been snowing. In fact it was still snowing. I remember wishing I had worn galoshes. Our janitor always keeps the walks shoveled, but it had snowed after his workday, so he wouldn’t have gotten to it until this morning. Anyway I walked from the garage around in front of the church and up the front walk. It was bitter cold and the snow was blowing, so I kept my head down and got inside as quickly as possible. And then I just went to my room and went to bed and fell asleep very quickly. I was awfully tired.”