Charisma (27 page)

“Make him tractable,” the man in the driver’s seat had said, “make him tractable fast, for God’s sake. We need him to be all right for tonight.”

“That’s your own damn bad planning,” the woman had said.

Then she had turned to him, smiling through those teeth, and flicked up the end of her skirt. Her boy thing was in the air and pulsing, pulsing right into his face. That was when he’d first realized he still had something over his mouth, something tight and thick, because what he wanted to do was bite that thing she was pushing at him right off, but he couldn’t. She grabbed him, turned him over and threw him back on the seat, face down. With the way he was tied, his bottom shot into the air and the joints in his legs began to ache, to scream really, and he had begun to cry again.

“Listen,” she’d said to him, just before she started something that would be the worst pain he had ever felt, the worst pain he would ever feel, not even that time later after he had run away and They had cut him, “listen. This is going to be better than a spanking.”

Now it was noon and years later, years and years, and he was free. Marietta was behind him. He had left her and the people who were attending to her back on Amora Street. The Spanish woman who had once been a nun was behind him, too, although nobody had found her yet as far as he knew. He had gotten to her in her own apartment after the Spanish girl at the church had told him what he needed to know. He was free and out on the street and even a little safe, because they would never expect to find him where he was about to go.

Coming up Church Street he brushed by an older man in a suit with his topcoat open. He lifted the man’s wallet—it was easiest with the ones who wanted to think they were too tough to really need a coat—and trusted that to give him the money he needed for lunch. Then he started walking up the steep hills that led to Prospect Avenue and Edge Hill Road.

If there was one thing he had figured out, after all the time he had spent in The Apartment, it was that to do what had been done to him you had to be not only bad, but rich.

F
OR SUSAN MURPHY, COMING
back to Edge Hill Road was disorienting. It reminded her of the first time she had come back to the Motherhouse after three years on mission, teaching in a parish school in the very worst part of the city of Detroit. She had been in Detroit for so long without a break, she had begun to think of her life there as normal. Small rooms, bad plumbing, mostly inoperative heating systems were the most she could expect. The Motherhouse, with its stone and stained glass and marble, had felt at first like a fairy tale and then like a prison. She could not make it make sense or make herself relax there. Walking up Edge Hill from the bus stop after two days of Damien House felt the same way. The houses all looked thyroidal. The fairy lanterns and colored tinsel that lined the walk to the O’Mara place—decorations for the open house they were holding that night, coy signposts to show the way to a party everybody knew their way to anyway—looked insane. She stopped for a moment at the O’Maras’ walk and fingered the soft metallic wings of an angel that had been taped to the lamppost there. Nobody took the injunction against decorations in Advent seriously anymore, she knew that, but the angel offended her anyway. There was something so damned blatant about it. Like coming back to Edge Hill Road had reminded her of coming back to the Motherhouse, the angel reminded her of the signs on the side streets off Congress Avenue,
TENDER LOVE, YOUNG LOVE, INNOCENCE.
They might as well have put up a blazing board of neon and said it straight out:
CHILDREN FOR SALE.

She walked slowly up the rest of the way to her own walk, then down her walk to her door, and let herself inside. The foyer was empty. The house was quiet. She kicked her shoes into the foyer closet, took off her coat and threw it on the stair rail. She didn’t feel like caring if the house looked a mess. Someone had turned the heat up and left it up. The foyer was close to steaming. Susan pushed up the sleeves of her sweater and her turtleneck both. Then she stood still and listened hard, for the sound of someone or something in the house. She got nothing.

She had a new pack of cigarettes, bought on Congress Avenue after she had left Damien House. She took it out, opened it up, and dropped the torn cellophane on the floor. Then she got a cigarette out, lit up with a match from the matchbook she had picked up at the diner where she had tried to have lunch, and dropped the spent match on the floor. Then she gave up, because nothing she could do, short of going to work with an ax, could make the foyer really look ragged. It was too big and too solidly built. Instead of trying, she headed for the back, where the kitchen was, and where she could be reasonably sure of finding some whiskey to put into her tea. She needed a drink and she needed a smoke and she needed somebody to scream at, preferably Dan. She thought two out of three might not be all that bad.

On her way to the kitchen, she passed the portrait of her grandmother her mother had always hated, hanging now in the back hall. Her grandmother had been a great enthusiast of social causes and a great advocate of political reform, as political reform had been defined in the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Susan remembered her as a nasty old lady with an even nastier temper, always talking about the deserving and the undeserving poor. She had used her own peculiar vision of Science as a weapon. It had been a weapon that cut.

Susan stopped in front of the portrait, ran her fingers through the dust that had collected on the top of the frame, and then turned the damn thing to the wall.

She had been alone in the kitchen for half an hour, drinking cups of tea half full of Benedictine, by the time Dan came in—the same Dan whom she had thought, only a few hours before, she was ready to kill on sight. The Benedictine had mellowed her. She had lost the energy she needed to do much of anything, and most of the urgency she needed to do it with conviction. She was still angry, but not on the warpath. Dan must have been coming in from work. He had his overcoat on and his shoes were wet. He smiled when he saw her sitting at the table and headed for the cupboards near the sink, where the coffee things were.

“It’s too damn bad you’re so damn into tea,” he said. “I thought for a while there that with you home I’d be spared the taste of brother Andy’s coffee.”

Susan picked up her cigarette, took a drag, put it down in the ashtray again. She had lit it just a few moments before Dan had come into the kitchen, so it was still long and almost ashless. She blew smoke into the air and watched Dan through it, putting down a cup and saucer, putting water on to boil, measuring instant out of a green-labeled jar, hunting through the sugar bowls for the one that was actually full of sugar.

“If anybody calls tonight, you’ve got to tell them I’m not in,” Dan said. “I brought a shit load of work home with me and I’ve got to get it done. That’s why I’m so early.”

Susan was still watching his back. It looked narrower than she remembered it. Dan looked smaller.

“I don’t know that I’m going to be home tonight,” she said.

“What?” He turned around and raised an eyebrow at her, that old Murphy trick their father had once used so well. “Don’t tell me you have a date.”

“No, I don’t have a date.”

“The O’Maras then? We were invited. I’ve got too much work to go, but Andy’s going. Is Andy going to take you to the O’Maras?”

“I always hated Denny O’Mara,” Susan said. “He was so damn full of himself he gave me a headache.”

“He’s married to Margaret Mary Beshnik.”

“She’s not somebody I know.”

Dan picked up the sugar bowl and spooned sugar into his coffee. For Susan it would have been too much sugar. For the old Dan, it would have been a sacrilege. She didn’t know what the tastes of the new Dan were. She didn’t know anything about him at all.

“Look,” he said, “I take it you’re pissed off at me for some reason or the other, and I take it I’m going to have to listen to the reason whether I want to or not. Why don’t you just get started?”

“Why don’t you take off your coat and sit down?”

“All right, I will.”

Dan brought his coffee to the kitchen table and put it down. He took off his coat, one sleeve at a time, elaborately careful, and laid it over the seat of a chair. He pulled out the chair directly under his coffee cup and sat down in it.

“All right,” he said again. “I have taken off my coat. I am sitting down. Now what?”

Susan crossed her arms and rested her elbows on the table. Dan was tight, very tight, and she didn’t blame him. In his place, she would have been very tight herself. What she hadn’t expected were lines around his eyes and the tightness under his jaw—the face he wore when he went to battle against his enemies. She hadn’t made up her mind about him, not entirely, but he had made up his mind about her. It felt like the death of something.

“What I want,” she said slowly, “are the answers to a few questions. Will you give them to me?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Just yes? Just like that?”

“I don’t see why not. If I don’t, you’ll probably hound me into the nuthouse.”

“I never hound, Dan, and you know it. Do you know where I slept last night?”

“Of course I do. Damien House.”

“And?”

“And what?” Dan shrugged. “Christ, Susan, if you want to run off and play Mother Teresa, it’s your own damn business. I don’t have anything against Damien House. It was my idea Andy go there in the first place.”

“I know it was. Now you’re prosecuting Tom Burne.”

“I’m prosecuting Tom Burne because I have a case.”

“Dan, that’s bull manure, and you know it. I was down on Sedger Street today. They do everything but post pictures of those children in their plate-glass windows with the prices underneath. You have a case.”

“I only have a case if the cops bring me one.”

“Is that what you want me to think? The cops don’t bust those bastards on Sedger Street?”

“They don’t.”

“They don’t dare,” Susan said. “While I was sitting around at Damien House this morning I had a few talks with a few people. Cops. People who work at Damien House. Kids—”

“There was another murder down there this morning,” Dan said abruptly, “another murder of an ex-nun. I wish to Christ you’d realize, Susan—”

“That I’m an ex-nun? Oh, I realize it, Dan. I realize there was a murder, too. I ought to. I found the damned body. I’m not interested in that right now.”

“You ought to be.”

“Don’t you dare tell me what I ought to be. According to one of the cops I talked to, they don’t bust those places on Sedger Street because it’s too good a way of putting their careers in a sling.”

“You’d have to talk to their sergeants about that.”

“Not according to this cop. According to this cop, I’d have to talk to you.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Her cigarette had managed to burn halfway to the butt in peace. It was lying in the ashtray looking like a worm turned to cinders. She spun it to get the ash off, picked it up, and took another drag. This time, when she blew the smoke out, she blew it directly into Dan’s face.

“Do you remember a case about two years ago, guy picked up down on Sedger for running a strip show with eight-year-old girls? He had a bar called Eden Rising.”

“Yes, I remember it.”

“According to the cop I talked to, the police department closed the Eden Rising down and handed the kids over to social services. Three weeks later, the kids had vanished into thin air—”

“That happens all the time,” Dan said quickly. “Why the hell would you think I had anything to do with that? Do you know what the foster parent system is
like
?”

“I’m beginning to get a fair idea, Dan, yes. And I’ve had chapter and verse from Francesca about how pimps come and steal their stables back when social services actually manages to get anything done. But this time the pimp was in jail.”

“I know where he was, Susan. I ought to. I put him there.”

“You also let him out. According to this cop—”

“Oh, crap,” Dan said. “What the hell do you think you’re playing at, anyway? Some cop hands you a cop legend and you swallow it whole. One walk down Sedger Street and you’re out to save the universe. One case gone sour and suddenly I’m the devil himself in horns and a tail—”

“The cop who busted the man who owned the Eden Rising ended up getting busted off the force three months later—”

“—For stealing two pounds of cocaine from the evidence room,” Dan exploded. “My God, Susan, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Are you even listening to yourself? You even
sound
like a cop. You sound like one of those fool women on television shows with the badges and the bad language and the—what the hell did you do in that damn convent of yours, anyway, read detective stories and fantasize about being on foot patrol?”

“The cop I talked to said you set that other cop up.”

“The cop you talked to had his reasons. A commitment to veracity wasn’t one of them.”

“The cop I talked to said it was common knowledge in the police department that you’ve been taking bribes from those people on Sedger Street—”

“Oh Jesus,” Dan said, “bribes. Bribes. Susan, what in the name of shit fuck would I want to take bribes for? Have you got the faintest idea how much money Daddy left me?”

“After you killed him?”

Dan reared back in his chair, white and stiff and wired as an electrified corpse. “Oh, that’s fine, Susan,” he said, “that’s wonderful. First I’m a pimp for the pimps of children and now I’m a goddamned murderer.”

“I always thought of it as a kind of euthanasia,” Susan said softly, “an act of corporal charity for the sake of Andy and me.”

“It might have been an act of corporal charity, Susan, but if it was, it wasn’t one committed by me.”

The Benedictine was making swirls like oil slick in her tea. Susan tilted the cup first one way and then the other. Then she drank what was left of it down and stood up. The sink was too far away, across the room, impossible to get to. She headed for it anyway, moving slowly, feeling drunk.