Charisma (19 page)

“Not much. They go to the same parish church, Saint Malachy’s. She’d been going through a bad time and some people at the church were trying to help her find a job. He needed a waitress so he took her on.”

Pat nodded. “Okay. She was a waitress on the breakfast shift?”

“Yes. And lunch, too, sometimes. She took over for other people a lot when they were out sick or needed a substitute. The way this guy talked, Ellen Burnett was looking for as much work as she could get.”

“Admirable,” Pat said dryly. “Was she on for breakfast shift Friday morning?”

“She was not only on, she opened.”

“Fine. And then what?”

“Nobody knows. She was here right through the heavy-duty traffic, between seven and eight. He wasn’t,” Ben jerked his head back toward the diner, “but one of the other girls who was on yesterday morning is here today, and she said Ellen was right where she belonged, doing her usual thing, until at least, say, ten or five of seven.”

“How can she be so sure?”

“Between six and six thirty it was busier than usual. ‘Hell on wheels’ is how she put it. They had to do a reset at twenty to seven.”

“What’s a reset?”

“Putting out more sugar, more ketchup, that kind of thing. The lady says it takes about ten to fifteen minutes to do a reset and Ellen did it by herself, because she—this lady—was ‘really tied up.’ ”

“Did you get this lady’s name?”

“Not yet.”

“Get it.”

Ben nodded. He really hadn’t had to be told. “Anyway,” he said, “this lady went back to the kitchen for something—with the old guy out they were all doing their own cooking—and when she came back Ellen Burnett was gone. And she stayed gone.”

“Was it near the time she was supposed to leave? Could she just have gotten pissed off and walked out?”

“She was supposed to stay for lunch.”

“Fine,” Pat said. He put his head back against the car seat and closed his eyes. Even with the heater going full blast the car felt cold. The whole world felt cold. “What about this lady of yours,” he asked. “When does she say she came back out from the kitchen?”

“About a quarter after seven.”

“Fine,” Pat said again. “So. Sometime between twenty of and quarter after, give or take ten or fifteen minutes on the assumption that your assessment of the lady as a sea slug is correct, Ellen Burnett walked out back of this diner and got herself killed. Why?”

“Why did she get herself killed?” Ben was surprised.

“No, why did she walk out back of this diner? Did you find any bruises on her?”

“It’ll have to wait for the med reports. I didn’t see any except the usual. You know, on her neck. And the cut.”

“On her neck and the cut. Like Theresa Cavello. Not like Margaret Mary McVann, no bruises, no contusions, no struggle.”

“I don’t get it,” Ben Deaver said.

Pat didn’t get it either, but he was willing to explain. He pulled himself forward off the seat and opened his eyes, trying to put the pieces together in a sequence: Theresa Cavello and Margaret Mary McVann; bruises and the lack of them; care with the body and the lack of it—it was a
progression.
Margaret Mary McVann had been roughed up. Theresa Cavello had been taken care of. At first glance, this one looked as if she had been taken care of, too.

“Mallory 2-11,” the dispatcher said, in that nasal monotone all dispatchers seemed to have. “Mallory 2-11 Klemmer. Mallory 2-11.”

Pat and Ben stared at the radio in amazement. “Jesus Christ,” Ben said, “2-11, from
Klemmer
? What’s he got down there, Lazarus raised in glory?”

“I don’t know.” Pat picked up, gave the answer that indicated merely that he’d heard, and put down again. Then he turned to Ben and said, “Get out of here. I’m going to answer this. Maybe he does have Lazarus raised in glory.”

“What am I supposed to do about Dr. James MacLure?”

Pat looked back at the man, at the cashmere coat. He had a grip on the uniform he had been lecturing and was yammering away.

“Shoot him,” Pat said. “Then skin him, stuff him, and donate him to the police museum.”

W
HEN PAT GOT BACK
on the road, it was rush hour. The streets were clogged in every direction and the built-up slush and hardened mud of weeks of bad weather didn’t help. He thought about putting his siren on and decided against it. It wouldn’t do him much good. Even the drivers who wanted to get out of the way wouldn’t have anywhere to go, and there would always be those others, down dirty furious at being asked to put anybody else’s interests above their own, who would be deliberately obstructive. He put on his light alone and kept his fingers crossed.

He had better luck than he’d expected to have. He made his lights, one after the other.

All the way, he was thinking about getting a 2-11 from Klemmer, about how absurd it was. A 2-11 was a life-and-death call: a shoot-out in progress, a live bomb, the spiritual descendants of the Symbionese Liberation Army in possession of the mayor’s office. Pat supposed some of those things could apply to Anton—certainly there could be a bomb in the morgue—but if they had, his 2-11 would have gone out to a wider audience than Pat Mallory alone. Nothing else Pat could think of would require a 2-11. Another body in the Ellen Burnett-Margaret Mary McVann-Theresa Cavello mode could wait until Pat had the time to drop in. Any body could. Anton had clients who were never in a hurry.

Pat eased himself into a right turn that brought him on to Dordon Street. It was a straight shot now from where he was to the morgue. If he had been doing anything but what he had been doing—if he had not been faced with James MacLure, waiting to be primed and petted and made to feel essential—he knew he would have called in before hightailing it out here, 2-11 or no 2-11. He tried again to think of what Anton could possibly be involved in, and failed. Then he decided it was a grace, like the nuns used to talk about back in parochial school. Anton was pulling some kind of joke, and God had let him pull it at the precise moment when Pat needed to be rescued.

He had just about convinced himself of the truth of that—just about given himself permission to go back to thinking of Ellen Burnett, and of the progression, when he reached the corner the morgue was on and happened to look left, down the side street that crossed in front of the morgue’s back door. In his shock, he hit the brake and came to a dead stop. He felt the car behind him plow into his rear and come to a stop itself. He bounced against the strap of his shoulder belt and back again without noticing.

To his left, the side street was crammed full of vehicles: medical vehicles mostly, ambulances and cars with M.D. plates and emergency units and 911 vans. There was only one police vehicle, and that was a patrol car. It was parked on the sidewalk thirty feet from the morgue’s back entry and it was empty. Pat snapped his seatbelt off, kicked his door open, and jumped out.

Behind him, the driver of the other car had also gotten out. He was big and red-faced and angry and Pat could see him coming, striding out across the street like a Trojan on his way to war. The regulations clicked through Pat’s head, perfectly formed but without effect: procedures, responsibilities, oversights, repudiations.

On the side street, a pair of men in overalls were pulling oxygen tanks out of a van and handing them to another pair of men. They had an old-time fire brigade of oxygen tanks set up at the morgue’s back door.

Pat gave one last glance at the angry older man still chasing along behind him, and then he started to run.

There was a patrolman stationed at the door, but all the patrolmen knew Pat Mallory, and he wasn’t stopped. Once inside the long corridor that led to the cold boxes, Pat stopped himself. His legs were aching and his chest was shot through with needle pains. He had been breathing in great gulps of air without compensating for the cold at all. He leaned against the nearest wall and forced himself to correct for it, forced himself to slow down, forced his heart to stop beating so hard. It was difficult, because the scene around him was chaos. The corridor was full of morgue personnel—attendants, clerks, lab technicians, assistant examiners—who hadn’t seen a scrap of excitement for years, except maybe on movie screens. They were all over the place now, milling and agitated. Some of the women were crying, and one of the men was being sick in a wastebasket. The emergency people were better organized but nowhere near calm. They kept striding back and forth, in and out of rooms, carrying heavy pieces of equipment that left Pat completely bewildered. The scene would have made a kind of crazy sense if it was being played out in a hospital emergency room. It made no sense at all here.

As soon as he was sure he had his breath back—and his heart, and his lungs—Pat pushed himself away from the wall and headed down the corridor. He had to thread his way through tighter and tighter knots of people as he went along. From somewhere far away, he could hear a man shouting, angry but controlled, “Clamp, God damn you, give me a clamp set up that blood get that tube in here you motherfucking idiot get me that clamp
now
.”

He passed a woman he recognized vaguely as being “someone from Anton’s office” and grabbed her by the arm, spinning her around. She looked like she was in a state of shock and barely registered what he had done.

“Anton,” he screamed into her face. “Where’s Anton?”

She came to, barely, and said, “Anton?”

Somebody behind him tapped Pat on the shoulder and said, “Dr. Klemmer’s in the file room?”—just like that, with a question mark at the end of it, as if he were giving an answer in a quiz where he wasn’t even sure of the questions.

Pat did an about face and headed for the corridor he knew would bring him to the file room, but he never got there. A hand came out and jerked his head around, away from the scene he had been staring at, until he was looking into the eyes of Dr. Anton Klemmer instead. The Anton Klemmer he knew was a man of great wit and great serenity. This Anton Klemmer was as tight as a cat in heat.

“Listen,” he said. “Pat, listen to me. I’ve got one.”

“Got one what?”

“One of the boys. The prostitutes. From the executions.”

Pat’s brain tried and failed, tried and failed, tried and failed to make the switch—and then finally made the connection. The boy prostitutes. The gangland-style executions. Edge Hill Road.

“Pat,” Anton said, “I’ve got one and I’ve got him alive.”

“What?”

Anton Klemmer looked around, found the closest door, opened it and looked inside. Then he nodded and pushed Pat toward whatever was kept in that dark and now deserted place.

“Go,” he said, “go and I’ll tell you all about it.”

The room turned out to be an ordinary office, two green metal desks pushed up against each other and a small collection of filing cabinets along one wall. Pat had no idea what it was an office for, and was sure Anton had no idea either. The desks were neat and the desk blotters looked unused. The walls were devoid of windows. The only light there was came from a bank of fluorescents in the ceiling. Pat looked at the walls—cinderblock painted pale green, like the walls outside—and saw that they were sweating.

Anton had taken a seat on the edge of one of the desks, and the white deadness of his face had begun to mellow into something pale, but at least recognizably human. The sounds of what was going on out in the corridor were audible, but muted—and that made all the difference. It was making all the difference for Pat, too. Not being in the middle of it made it easier to think.

Anton took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face. In spite of the cold—and it was cold, Pat realized, it was freezing down here—he had been sweating. He forced a weak imitation of his old smile across his face and said, “It’s been years since I’ve been part of an emergency. I seem to have lost my knack for it.”

Pat looked back at the door to the corridor. “Is it an emergency?” he asked. “What’s going on out there?”

“What’s going on out there is that a team from the Yale New Haven Hospital is doing their best to make a temporary miracle permanent. I hope they succeed. He is very young. I would say no more than eight.”

“The boy,” Pat said.

“The boy.” Anton nodded. “I’ve never put out a 2-11 call before, Pat. If the circumstances had been different, I might have been amused.”

“I thought you were amusing yourself. I thought it was some kind of joke.”

“I almost wish it were.”

Anton got off the desk, fumbled around for a chair, found one and sat down. He looked too tired to stand and too shocked to meet Pat’s eyes.

“It started this morning, you know, very early this morning, just after five o’clock. God only knows what would have happened if I hadn’t come in.”

“Why did you come in?”

“Woman trouble.” Anton shrugged. “Woman trouble and the great void. I seem to be going through one of my periods of existential angst. If you don’t believe in God, there are only two cures for those, and the woman wasn’t cooperating, so I decided to work.”

“And?”

“Well,” Anton shook his head. “I came in at four thirty. I did my files. I did my files again. I worked on a paper I’m presenting in Toronto next month. I puttered and told myself I was being productive. Then, at about five after five, we got a van call. Three bodies in the water, out by the New Haven railroad station.”

“Three,” Pat said.

“Don’t look so surprised. When they come up from the water, they come up in singles, pairs, triples, anything. The triples usually come in the spring. I don’t know. Maybe it was odd for winter.”

“This call of yours come from cops?” Pat asked.

“Of course it did.”

“Did you examine them?”

“Well, I didn’t go out on the van call, obviously. When the announcement came over the speakers that the van was in, I went down, yes. I looked them over. Two old men and this boy. I would have sworn all three of them were dead.”

“The boys who have been executed had the backs of their heads shot off. What about that?”

“What about it? The three of them were all covered with weeds and dirt. I didn’t do a formal examination, Pat. I—just looked them over. And had another attack of angst. When I get really worked up, I can sound like Young Werther with no trouble at all.”