Charisma (14 page)

“Someone might come in and see me giving it to you.”

“What is it? A dirty book?”

“Of course not.”

“I’ve never read a dirty book. My sister keeps telling me I don’t know what I’m missing.”

“This is a religious thing.”

She gave him another long look, fond this time, and then started off toward the back, where the garbage cans were. There was a small courtyard out there, blocked from the street by a high solid fence. It had a door in it to let the garbage trucks in, but the garbage trucks only came on Thursdays.

He wrapped his fingers around the rosary in his pocket and slid off his stool. He saw her disappear between the refrigerators just as the knife began to prick him again.

“I wish I knew what went on in your head,” she was saying, in a high clear voice that carried. “First you’re here. Then you’re there. Now you’re everywhere. You remind me of this television show I used to watch. It had a genie in it. I used to camp out in the living room with a bag of potato chips and wish I could be one.”

He caught up with her. He stepped past her into the courtyard and waited until she got outside. Then he slammed the door behind them both.

“Look,” he said, holding the rosary out to her. “Real amber.”

Three minutes later, she was dead, lying with her arms spread out across the concrete and her feet in the trash. He got a handful of snow and pressed it down on her forehead, making her cold, making her freeze. He would hold the snow to her forehead until her skin was just a little stiff. He had learned with Margaret Mary McVann that human flesh was very hard to cut when it was warm.

Her name was Ellen Burnett. It was engraved on a plastic pin she wore on the pocket of her uniform.

T
HE RECTORY WHERE JOHN
Kelly lived with four other Jesuit priests was not really a rectory at all. To be that, it would have had to be attached to a parish. Instead, like most Jesuit houses unconnected to a Jesuit university, it was attached to nothing. He was there because, as auxiliary bishop and vicar for New Haven, he had to live somewhere. The Jesuits interpreted their vow of poverty as a sacrifice of ownership. As a member of the Society of Jesus, there was literally nothing in the world that was actually “his.” Even the clothes on his back belonged to his order. On the other hand, he lived in this house, built in 1891 by a man who’d made a fortune out of the Civil War. The hallways were wide and the bedrooms were oversized. Downstairs, there was a living room that had once been the Great Hall of a castle in Bavaria. It had been moved stone by stone to New Haven and reassembled on the spot, complete with gold-leaf-painted mirrors and sculpted marble columns that held up the fireplace mantel. Being here, he could almost imagine himself a different kind of man in a different kind of time: a man poverty inspired instead of paralyzing; a time when inspiration was applauded and might have done some good.

He went down the curving staircase to the foyer, then across the foyer to the dining room. The dining room had a convex ceiling lined with miniature imitations of the foyer chandelier. Underneath it, a black walnut table stretched out to the length of fifty feet. As always, his fellow priests were clustered at the far end of it. They always jammed themselves together as if they were having breakfast in a small diner’s even smaller booth.

He walked down to them and picked up the plate that had been set at his place. Along one wall there was an oversize sideboard. On the sideboard were half a dozen sterling silver serving trays, each set in a sterling silver frame that held it over a glowing pink candle. The pink was their housekeeper’s idea of piety. Pink—old rose really—was the liturgical color of the first three weeks of Advent.

He got toast, scrambled eggs, and bacon. Then he sat down next to Manuel Rodez and his Siamese attachment, the daily newspaper.

“Isn’t anyone going to say good morning?” he said.

Rodez looked up, “It isn’t a good morning,” he said. “In fact, it’s a perfectly lousy morning. And it’s Friday the thirteenth.”

On the other side of the table, Bill Keeler coughed. “I think you’re exaggerating that,” he said. “We’ve got better weather than we’ve had for a month.”

Rodez pushed the paper across to Kelly. “Look at this,” he said. “This was on the doorstep when I got up.”

“The paper’s always on the doorstep when you get up,” Jim Barnes said.”

“The paper’s usually a lot of dreck about local politicians.” Rodez pushed the paper at Kelly again. “Look at it,” he insisted. “You’re the vicar around here. You ought to have known this already.”

“The vicar is not supposed to spend his time hanging around in morgues,” Keeler said.

Rick Borden laughed. “John’d probably have a better time if he did. It has to beat trying to explain to the bishop why some priest in the Congo is saying his Mass in Esperanto.”

“That’s not what John’s trying to explain to the Bishop,” Keeler said. “He’s trying to explain how being a television star is theologically equivalent to bloody martyrdom.”

Rodez was still pushing the paper out. John took it, sighing a little. Since he’d first mentioned Victor Coletti’s offer, he’d been under almost constant attack from these four men he lived with. Coupled with the attacks he made on himself—What was he doing? Why was he doing it? Why was he taking risks?—these had made his life damn near unbearable. What made it more unbearable still was that he didn’t know why they were so hostile. It might have been jealousy—here he was, not only on his way up the hierarchy but with a chance at media fame as well—but these weren’t ordinarily jealous men. The only other explanation he could think of was a kind of instinctive distaste. Television preaching was for low-rent Protestants, Fundamentalists, and Pentacostals, not the educated army of the Society of Jesus. Maybe they thought he was letting down the side.

He spread the paper out in front of him and read the headline. It would have been impossible not to. It was the biggest type he had ever seen, and so black it looked as if a gallon of ink had been emptied on the page.

“Psychopath,” he read. “Psychopath?”

“Open it up,” Rodez said.

“Manuel is taking it personally,” Jim Barnes said. “He thinks the whole thing is a Protestant plot against Holy Mother Church.”

“Open it
up
,” Rodez said again.

John Kelly opened it up, to find two black-bordered pictures sitting right below the center crease. The second was of a woman he was sure he had never seen before. The first one, though, was vaguely familiar. He looked down at the caption and read: Margaret Mary McVann.

“McVann,” he said. “Didn’t I know someone named McVann?”

“You might have,” Borden said. “She ran the soup kitchen for Saint Gabriel’s over on the Derby line.”

“That’s right. She came in asking for money from the diocese. I think we gave it to her.”

“She was an ex-nun,” Rodez said.

John Kelly said “mmm.” He could not imagine leaving the priesthood himself. The mere idea scared the hell out of him. He left the world of ex-religious strictly alone.

“The thing is,” Rodez said, “they were all ex-nuns. All these women.”

“All two of them,” Keeler pointed out.

“Two is enough. It’s a pattern. Even the
Register
thinks it’s a pattern.”

“A pattern of what?” Barnes asked.

“A pattern of someone going around killing ex-nuns,” Rodez said. “And you know what it means if he’s killing
ex
-nuns. You have to know what it means.”

“What does it mean?” Borden said.

“Traditionalists,” Rodez said solemnly. “They’ve always been unhinged. Now there’s one walking around who’s absolutely crazy.”

Borden threw his hands in the air. “Rodez, for God’s sake. You see traditionalists under the bed the way J. Edgar Hoover used to see Communists.”

“There’s a difference,” Rodez said. “The Communists weren’t there. The traditionalists are.”

“The traditionalists are happy as long as they’ve got a Tridentine Mass they can go to. Which, in this diocese, they do.” Borden looked at the spoon he’d been holding and put it down. It was clean. His plate was clean, too. So were his knife and fork. The only dirty dish at his plate was the cup that had held his single black coffee of the morning. Borden was one of those people who never seemed to eat anything.

He turned to John and said, “I suppose you are going to have to do something about this. God only knows what. The second victim was that Cavello woman who worked at Damien House.”

“The second one happened right in the kitchen at Damien House,” Rodez said.

Borden ignored him. “I don’t think it has anything to do with the Church, but the bishop might. Isn’t this the kind of thing you’re supposed to handle?”

“I don’t think there’s ever been this kind of thing before,” John said, and it was true. He’d heard of priests gone renegade in one way or another—sexual indiscretions; liturgical innovations; theological scandals—but never of a serial murderer in any way connected to the Church. In real life, at any rate. Like many priests, he read William Kienzle’s mystery novels faithfully. The first of those had been about a homicidal maniac knocking off the clergy and religious of the city of Detroit.

They were looking at him expectantly, as if he were about to give them the answer to their ultimate questions, the ones they thought about but never asked: what did he do, and why had he been sent here to do it? Since he didn’t know the answers himself—the Bishop had said only that New Haven was “becoming an area of great pastoral concern” and that somebody ought to be here—he looked away out the broad dining-room windows at the back lawn.

“I suppose somebody will call the office for a statement,” he said. “They do that every time a Catholic butterfly farts. Maybe I ought to make sure what the police think about this thing.”

“Maybe you ought to make sure what you think about it,” Rodez said. He dumped the newspaper in Kelly’s lap. “Take this.”

“I will.”

“I’m surprised the press haven’t got in touch with you already,” Borden said. “Your office board should have been swamped.”

John Kelly leaned forward and got a big blob of butter to put on his toast. His toast was cold.

Actually, his office switchboard could have been swamped all day yesterday. There was no way he could have known. He had spent all of yesterday afternoon with a lawyer—a Protestant lawyer—from one of the large law firms in Hartford. The firm in Hartford had connections to a firm in New York. The firm in New York did a lot of work with television contracts. He couldn’t have afforded either of them, but one of the Hartford firm’s senior partners was a Good Catholic Layman of the old school.

Francis Quinn’s office had been a room the size of a Record World store, with a fifty-thousand-dollar Iranian rug on the floor. Quinn sat behind his desk, tapping the contract Victor Coletti wanted John Kelly to sign. His suit had been custom made at Brooks Brothers. His shirt had been custom made at J. Press. His tie was dark blue with a pattern of tiny embroidered mallards on it. Even his head had looked both custom made and bought. Money and power had erased whatever traces of ethnicity he had been born with.

“This,” he had told Kelly, “is a very good contract. Too good.”

“How could a contract be too good?”

“It could be too good in a hundred different ways,” Quinn said. “I don’t know this Victor Coletti. I’ve never had any dealings with him.” The expression on his face said that he never would. People like Francis Quinn didn’t have dealings with people who were so obviously—Italian. “I don’t know how this Coletti does business. I just know how he ought to do business.”

Quinn started tapping the contract again. “He’s giving away the store, Your Excellency. He’s giving you things for which I’d expect to have to negotiate for months. And even then I wouldn’t expect to get them. Not unless you were already Fulton J. Sheen.”

“Maybe he’s just what he says he is.” Kelly wanted to ask Quinn to stop calling him “Your Excellency.” Nobody called auxiliary bishops “Your Excellency.” It was a title only rarely used for archbishops these days. “Maybe he’s a good Catholic layman trying to do the right thing by a priest.”

“He owns a television station.”

“So?”

“Well, Your Excellency. I’m a good Catholic layman. I always try to do right by priests. But let me tell you, I’d look at the situation differently if you were a lawyer as well as a priest, and you wanted to, for instance, merge your firm into mine. I’d be nervous about setting a precedent.”

“A precedent for what?”

“For future contracts.” Quinn was exasperated. “Your Excellency, you’re not the only one Victor Coletti is going to sign to appear on the air this year. His station is a network affiliate. He’s got to have a local news staff if nothing else. That staff is going to have the terms of this contract before you ever put your signature on it. They’re going to cause him a lot of trouble.”

“But this is the contract he sent me,” Kelly pointed out. “He must be willing to live with the trouble.”

“The question is why?”

“Does there have to be a reason?”

“Yes,” Quinn said. “There most definitely does have to be a reason. Unless the man is a saint, which I really don’t believe.”

Kelly wanted to say why not?, but he didn’t—any more than he had asked Quinn to stop calling him Your Excellency. He had the devil in him, as his mother used to say, in that brief period in his life when she had been able to say anything at all. He didn’t like Francis Quinn. Because of that, he was playing the Unworldly Priest well past the point where it made any sense. He’d grown up on the street, for God’s sake. He might not have had much experience with men who owned television stations, but he’d had more than enough with thieves. Francis Quinn couldn’t tell him anything about Victor Coletti he hadn’t already guessed.

But Quinn was a lace curtain Irishman. Like most of his tribe, he was both arrogant and hypocritical.

“I’m going to send you down to a young man we have,” he said. “David Murrow. He specializes in things like this.”