Charisma (12 page)

Actually, it was the ass of that new girl in processing, but Pat didn’t say that. He just sank more deeply into his chair and started trying to work it all out. Billy Hare. Theresa Cavello. Margaret Mary Whoever she was. Two big messes, when last week he had had none.

A moment later, Anton put the receiver on the desk and shoved it across to Pat. He was wincing.

“It’s for you,” he said.

W
HEN PAT PICKED UP
the phone, he expected to hear a voice he didn’t know: Markham’s or Halt’s, telling him why they weren’t already at the morgue. Their absence had ticked away at him all the way through his conversation with Anton Klemmer. Andrea had gotten back to him after she’d called down to the pen. They had definitely been there and they had definitely gotten his message. Where were they? Their absence linked up with the processing girl’s stupidity. It was all incompetence and indifference, the way everything else in life was these days. He couldn’t understand it. He remembered his mother cleaning, his father making a high chair in the back bedroom: the tension and seriousness, the undiluted dedication. He’d grown up with people who cared, about everything. He cared about everything. When things got crazy the way they had these last two weeks, he began to take it personally, as guilt. He kept thinking that if he had worked harder, thought smarter, stayed awake longer, none of it would have happened. It was some lack in himself that made violence possible. People like Markham and Halt and the processing girl cared about nothing. They didn’t see themselves responsible for the state of their own teeth. Most of the time they just made him tired. They became part of the nothing-in-particular that was drowning him in exhaustion. Every once in a while, like now, they made him impossibly angry.

He put the receiver to his ear, telling himself he didn’t know Markham and Halt. They could have been held up by a break in another case. They could have stopped on Chapel Street to prevent a robbery. They could be going to the aid of an officer in trouble, taking a heart attack victim to the hospital, delivering a baby. It wasn’t fair to people to judge them without knowing the facts of their case, and Pat Mallory liked to be fair.

Still, when he spoke, his “Yes?” had the bite in it that was only there when he was ready to kill somebody. Every officer in Homicide knew it well.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then a cough and a sigh, and Ben Deaver said, “Pat?”

“Oh,” Pat said. He literally felt the heat leaving his body, lifting off from his forehead and spinning out into the air. It left a wash of embarrassment behind, because he’d been a jerk. “Sorry. I thought you were somebody else.”

“I guess,” Ben said. “I almost feel like somebody else. We’ve got another one of the boys.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Pat said. He looked at the ceiling and sighed. “I’m in Anton Klemmer’s office,” he said, although Deaver must have known that. “I’m here on the Cavello thing. What did you want?”

Deaver took a deep breath, sucking into the phone. “I’m down on Whalen Avenue, down by the theater. You know where that is?”

“Yes.” Deaver was too young to remember, but there had been a time when the movie theaters on Whalen Avenue were a Mecca for every high-school student in the city. Pat had seen the first four James Bond movies there. He’d even seen the first re-release of
Gone with the Wind,
with a girl from Saint Mary’s he was hoping to talk into necking with him.

“I’m in a phone booth about a block west of the theater,” Deaver said. “About a block north of here there’s a vacant lot. Can you find it?”

“Of course I can find it. If you’re there the place has to be full of cops. Anyone could find it.”

“The place is full of cops,” Deaver said. “I’ve done as much damage control as I can—”

“Damage control?”

“Keeping the techs away from the scene. It would be easier if Dbro wasn’t here. Every time I tell them to pack up and wait, he tells them to unpack and work. Can you get down here right away?”

“Ben, for Christ’s sake—”

Anton Klemmer had a crystal paperweight on his desk, made in the shape of a round cut diamond. Without realizing it, Pat had picked it up in his free hand. Now he put it down again, carefully, as if he were afraid he was going to break it.

“Do you have anybody there besides cops and techs?”

“Some civilians standing on the sidewalks, trying to figure out what’s going on. That’s it. So far.”

“All right.”

“I’ve got to go back and make sure Dbro isn’t making mud pies in the middle of the mess. Get down here right away, all right?”

Pat started to say “All right” himself, but Deaver had hung up. He stared at the receiver for a moment and then put it back in its cradle.

On the other side of the desk, Anton Klemmer sat with his arms folded over his chest, his head cocked. “Bad news?” he asked.

“Yes,” Pat said.

“What do I do with your two detectives, if they ever get here?”

Pat was already reaching for his jacket, trying to remember if he’d brought along a pair of gloves. He had a vague memory of very bad weather waiting for him on the outside, terrible weather he had to protect himself against. His incipient burn-out seemed to be in full gear. He felt like his head was stuffed with cotton candy.

“Get them to do a back search,” he told Anton Klemmer. “When you’ve got them safely into the cold room, stuff them in a drawer and lock them up.”

Because he had been in a hurry, Pat Mallory had come down to the morgue alone. Coming out, he knew he ought to call for an official car and a driver to take him to Ben Deaver. That was the way things were done. It was incredible how many people got crazy when you skirted protocol, as if not wanting to be driven around like a kid too young for a license was an insult to all the people in the Department who wouldn’t mind a bit. Even the uniforms sometimes took it that way. Either that, or they hated you for what they thought was your attempt to play Good Buddy.

Dbro was going to hate it if he showed up on the bus, but he didn’t care about Dbro. Deaver wouldn’t even notice. Besides, Pat was antsy. The shock-feeling had worn off, and he was already thinking of the dragging feeling as “his burn-out,” the way another man might think of “his marriage.” There was a lot of adrenaline left in him yet. He wasn’t panicking, but he thought he could, if he let himself. What was going on here was an avalanche. There was too much of it, coming too fast, flowing over his head in soft cold waves that threatened to suffocate him.

There was a bus stop two blocks from the morgue’s front door, and he caught a northbound there, wedging himself into a seat between a young girl with her arms full of packages from Macy’s and an old man who smelled of muscatel. The old man’s jacket had been torn nearly in strips. It hung down from his shoulders like a fringe. Pat watched the other passengers watching him: a black woman with a choir robe over one arm and a Bible in her hands; a black man in a good suit with a briefcase between his feet; a college boy in a Harvard sweatshirt and a pair of Maine hunting boots pretending to read a textbook on sociology. They were all sitting very still, as if any movement on their part would flip the old man’s switch and turn him into a bellowing maniac with a taste for human blood.

The northbound had a long way to go. By the time it got halfway to Pat’s stop, the old man was the only other passenger on it, and he had fallen asleep. Pat got up and went to sit behind the driver. By law, that seat was a handicapped space, extrawide to accommodate wheelchairs and walkers and canes. He stretched out his legs and looked through the oversize windows at a city that was rapidly dwindling into rubble. Small streets full of smaller houses that, farther south, had been brightly painted and well kept up were, here, small streets with smaller houses in decay. Then the houses stopped and he was surrounded by blank brown brick buildings that could have contained anything, or nothing. New Haven was getting to be like New York: a place where turning the corner was a kind of teleportation.

He saw the theater ahead in the distance and stood up. He wanted to walk a couple of blocks. The driver braked for a light and looked up at him.

“Cop?” he said.

“Yeah,” Pat said. “I’m a cop.”

“I thought you were a cop,” the driver said. “I wasn’t sure you were a cop. Mostly you get a cop, he’ll flash his shield.”

Pat had thought about flashing his shield, but he’d decided against it. Cops were allowed to ride city buses free if they were on Department business. A lot of them rode free all the time. It was one of those situations that was impossible to untangle honorably, so Pat didn’t untangle it at all. He just carried a lot of change.

The driver went through the intersection and pulled up at the stop on the opposite curb, pulling his doors open as he went, even though that was more illegal here than smoking marijuana. Pat was halfway down the steps by the time the bus stopped, which was illegal too. It brought a satisfied little smile to the driver’s face.

“It’s always one thing or the other,” the driver said. “Don’t I
know.
”

Pat jumped onto the sidewalk and started walking north.

Right around the corner from Whalen on Belknap Street, just out of sight of the avenue behind an outcrop of brown brick, the world was full of police. Obviously, while Deaver had been trying to keep things calm, Dbro had been sounding alarms from one end of town to the other. Two black-and-whites, two unmarkeds, the Mobile Crime Unit, an ambulance, a medical examiner’s van: it looked like the scene of a high-level political assassination. Pat kept expecting to see a brace of FBI agents talking into walkie-talkies.

The vacant lot stretched between two buildings that had been built to look like squared-off, tiered wedding cakes. Pat walked past the first one and looked into the clearing. The civilians were being held well back, possibly because there weren’t that many of them. Ben Deaver had managed to do at least one of the things he had set out to do. There was nobody who looked like a reporter in the small crowd. There were no television cameras at all.

Pat made his way through the line, past little clots of officers and technicians who first stared at him and then stared away. In outdoor clothes instead of the regulation suit, he wasn’t instantly recognizable. Deaver was pacing back and forth in front of a large pile of equipment that was still packed into black boxes. His feet kept scuffing across the hard shell of the frost and making it spark. Pat saw him look up and waved.

“Jesus Christ,” Deaver said when Pat finally got to him. “Where have you been?”

“I took the bus.”

Deaver turned around and swung his arms in the air, over the boxes and toward the open space beyond. “I managed to keep them out of there. Just. I told one of the patrolmen you’d suspend him and I told one of the M.E.’s men you’d have his nuts. I told them anything that came into my head.”

“I take it Dbro made a few phone calls.”

“Six.”

“Was one of them to Dan Murphy’s office?”

“I don’t know.”

“One of them probably was.”

Deaver shrugged. “All I care about is that you’re here and it hasn’t been fucked up yet.”

Pat walked around him and around the boxes. As soon as he got clear of the equipment, he saw a single shoe attached to a single foot, sticking out of a clump of low thorny brush. Weeds grew fast everywhere, but in vacant lots they grew stunted. These would not have been high enough to hide a full-grown man.

“Who found the body?” he asked Deaver.

“Guy runs a junk store out on Belknap. He says he comes out here a couple of times a week to see what he can find.”

“You don’t believe him?”

“Who knows?”

“Then what?”

Deaver had turned his back to the scene. “He called 911. He even stuck around. Dubrowski and Pierce caught it and came on out.”

Pat went in a little farther toward the brush. Something had gone right. That made him feel better, but not good. It was impossible to feel good about anything while you were staring at that shoe, a perfect miniature Gucci loafer whose brass horsebit winked and glittered even though there wasn’t any sun. He went in a little farther and found himself staring at a black sock with the words
Christian Dior
embroidered on the heel.

“Ben?”

“Somebody dumped a load over there on the other side of those bottles,” Ben said. “Dbro kept wanting somebody to clean it up.”

Pat said nothing. The dump would belong to a junkie or a wino who’d gotten too high to make it to a bathroom, or hadn’t had a bathroom to make it to. Even if it belonged to their executioner, they wouldn’t get anything out of it. You couldn’t analyze feces the way you did blood types or fingerprints and come up with a match. It might have made some difference if it was a trademark. Since there hadn’t been any feces at the first site, it wasn’t.

He went right to the edge of the brush, got down on his haunches, and parted the weeds. In life, this boy wouldn’t have been anything at all like the boy they’d found at the bottom of Edge Hill Road. Billy Hare was small and blond. This boy was dark and already muscular in a babyish way that promised real power when he reached adulthood. Except that he was never going to reach adulthood, and in death he was Billy Hare’s twin. The same off-the-rack designer clothes. The same careless hairstyle, cut too well to have been picked up at the local barbershop. Pat checked and found a pair of bikini underpants, made of silk in bright electric blue.

He stepped back and let the weeds fall into place again. Pieces of the boy’s head had been shot out all over the lot behind him. The gray of the brain matter was still gray and the red of the blood only slightly brown. He hadn’t been here long, even if you factored in the effect of all this cold.

Pat turned around and went back to Deaver, still standing with his back to the scene.

“Did Dbro know the name of this one, too?”

“I didn’t ask him,” Deaver said.

“Ask him. Then get the techs here to do what they’re supposed to do.”

“I want
you
to do something,” Deaver said.