Charisma (32 page)

F
ROM WHAT PAT MALLORY
could remember, in the old days there had been places in the city of New Haven where it had been possible to take a girl for dinner, spend between thirty and fifty dollars, and make her feel as if she’d been transported to one of the nicer sections of New York. Of course, in the old days—in the days when Pat Mallory was more interested in girls than women—he hadn’t been able to afford to take a girl to dinner. Now he thought it might be impossible to find the kind of place he was looking for at any price, especially in the center of the city proper. He had to be in the center of the city because he was on call, as he had been on call now for over a month. He had to keep his beeper within range of the call room at police headquarters, or he had to go home, where he could be reached by phone. He supposed he could go to one of those fancy restaurants out in the country and then call in and leave the number, but he didn’t like the idea. There were too many people in the New Haven Police Department who would love to know where and when he was having a date.

Assuming that what was going on here was a date.

He looked across to the other side of the car and saw Susan Murphy take a pack of cigarettes out of her jacket pocket and light up. He didn’t mind, but he thought it said something about how long she had spent in a convent and how recently she’d come out. She obviously didn’t know there were people out here—men as well as women—who went totally insane at the very idea of someone smoking tobacco.

She was fumbling around on the dashboard, looking for the ashtray and not finding it. He leaned forward and got it open for her.

“I’m going to tell you now what I told you back at the hospital,” he said. “If I was your brother Dan, I wouldn’t let you go wandering around the streets at night.”

“I’m going to tell you now what I told you back at the hospital,” she said. “If you were my brother Dan, you wouldn’t have anything to say about it.” She leaned toward the windshield and looked out. “Is that the Payne Whitney gymnasium? Where are we?”

“We’re not near the Payne Whitney gymnasium. We’re around the other side near the cemetery. That’s a Yale something.”

“Everything in New Haven is a Yale something.”

“Except the stuff that’s a Catholic something.”

They looked at each other and laughed. “Oh, well,” Susan said. “I’m sorry I gave you such a shock. I’d had a fight with Dan and I was restless—I told you about that. I just wish life was like television a little, with resolutions.”

“Do you like television?”

“I don’t know. We weren’t allowed to have them, in my order, except that the sister superior always had one locked up in a closet just in case of an assassination or an earthquake or something. I watched for about an hour a couple of days after I got home—my brother Andy has a whole list of shows he watches every week—do you know my brother Andy?”

“You know I do. You were with him the first time I met you, at Damien House.”

“That’s right. A lot of people find him invisible. Anyway, after he went to bed I jumped through the channels for a while, on this cable box, and there were things—”

“Sex,” Pat said solemnly.

“Sadomasochism with genitals,” Susan said. “One of the things my reverend mother always told me was that it was a mortal sin not to call a spade a spade. This particular spade that I saw ought to have been rated triple-X. And do you know what was odd?”

“What?”

“I’d always been told that the point of pornography was to arouse the passions. That’s how they would have put it in my moral theology class. But good grief, Pat, that thing put my passions into a deep freeze for a week. I don’t
believe
there are women out there dreaming of having some man urinate on them.”

“There aren’t. Those things aren’t made for women.”

“Are there things like that made for women?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Pat said. “I’ve been a cop for I don’t remember how long. Seventeen, eighteen years. I’ve seen the evidence in hundreds of obscenity raids—back when we had obscenity raids. I’ve been in a thousand porno shops for one reason or another, usually to look at a corpse. People tell me they make porno for women, but I’ve never actually seen any.”

“Maybe it’s lesbian porno. I went to a conference once where this woman talked about lesbian feminism.”

“Three-quarters of the videotapes in any porno store are lesbian videotapes. Men love to watch them.”

“Marvelous.”

“If I wasn’t so sure this guy we’ve got is picking his victims in advance, I’d fill you full of dinner and then take you home and lock you in your room. Every time you blow smoke in my face, I keep thinking of Marietta O’Brien.”

On the other side of the car the cigarette went up to Susan’s mouth, down at the ashtray, up to Susan’s mouth again. The car was filled with a thin haze of smoke that Pat liked the smell of, although he didn’t usually like the smell of smoke. Susan had cracked her window a little and most of it was drifting outside, being replaced by sharp cold air that was doing its job of keeping them both awake.

He felt rather than saw her turn away from him, struggling under the restraint of her seatbelt. He felt rather than saw her turn back. He wondered if she was thinking about their talk at Damien House. Tacitly, they had decided to forget about that, at least on the conversational level. She hadn’t mentioned it, and he wouldn’t. He couldn’t believe she wasn’t at least thinking about it.

Her cigarette was out. She dumped the butt in the ashtray and got another. He wondered if she’d been a heavy smoker before she entered her order.

“Pat,” she said, hesitant, “you think you know who killed those women, don’t you? You think it’s the same person who killed those boys.”

“No. I think it’s connected to the killings of the boys. Two different murderers with two different reasons.”

“But connected.”

“Oh, yes. I’ve been half sure of it for a couple of weeks. Then I had that talk I told you about, with Bishop Riley.” He hadn’t mentioned the lecture he ended up delivering. The memory of it made him feel like a jerk. “Now I don’t have the names and addresses of anybody—except I’ve got the alias of one of them—this is getting convoluted. I know who in the sense that I know what: what they are, what they’re involved in. In the case of the boys, I even know why they’re doing what they’re doing. And, yes, they’re connected.”

Susan nodded. “This conviction you’ve got that they’re all connected, it doesn’t rest on the idea that the man who’s murdering the ex-nuns is picking them out in advance, does it? I mean picking them out of announcements in the diocesan newspaper or because he knows them and they’ve told him they were nuns or anything like that.”

“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

“What I’m getting at is, would it ruin your theory if it turned out that the man who was killing the ex-nuns was just picking them up off the street, seeing them and just knowing they used to be nuns.”

Pat jerked his head around, away from the traffic, away from everything he ought to be looking at. He nearly ran into the back of a city bus.

“How the hell could he do that?” he demanded. “How the hell could it be possible?”

Susan Murphy sighed. “I’m not saying he did do it,” she said, “but trust me, with an ex-nun of a certain age, or an ex-nun from a certain kind of order, it would be easy.”

He took her to George and Harry’s. Partly he took her there because he knew it, it was close and convenient. Partly he took her there because it was the kind of place he’d always dreamed of going when he was young—a Yale place, for rich Protestants. What all that meant now, he didn’t know. What he did know was that George and Harry’s didn’t look so exotic, or so rich, now that he’d reached the exalted position of chief of Homicide.

He let the waitress sit them down in a booth, ordered himself a Perrier, and ordered Susan something called a Rusty Nail. He didn’t know what was in it and he didn’t ask. He just waited until she got it and then he said, “All right. Tell me all about it. How could this man know a woman was an ex-nun just by seeing her on the street.”

Susan had her cigarettes out again. “It would have to be more than just seeing her,” she said. “He’d have to follow her for a while. But you’ve got to understand, Pat, that traditional formation practice—”

“Formation practice?”

“The process of turning a twentieth-century teenager into a model of sixteenth-century sanctity.” She grinned. “It’s not that bad, really. It’s not that stupid, either. There are a lot of orders these days that have chucked traditional formation altogether, right along with traditional habits and the rule of silence. If a woman had entered one of those in the last ten or fifteen years and come out, he wouldn’t have been able to tell. There wouldn’t be any difference. But most of the women you’ve found have been older, haven’t they?”

“Three out of the four.”

“Then no matter what order they were in, they were all trained the same way. That’s the key. What about the young one? What order was she in?”

“Franciscan,” Pat said.

Susan threw her hands in the air. “There are probably five hundred orders of nuns in this country with ‘Franciscan’ in their names somewhere. What kind of Franciscan?”

Pat hesitated, then reached behind him for his jacket and the notebook he kept in the inside breast pocket. It took a while to find what he was looking for. His notes on these two cases were all jumbled up and overexamined. He found the reference and dropped the notebook down on the table.

“Franciscan Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus. Does that help?”

“Very much so. Was she at least thirty years old?”

“Thirty-three.” That was in the notebook, too, right under the name of the order.

“Did she enter her order when she was younger than, say, twenty-two?”

“She was,” he had to search for that one, “nineteen.”

“Wonderful,” Susan said. “FSH has gone completely over to social gospel lunacy by now, but they were late starters. When your young one entered, they were still trying to train real nuns. Excuse me. It’s extremely bad form for those of us on the traditional side to admit that we don’t consider those of us on the modernist side real nuns.”

“I won’t report you. You still haven’t told me how he could have known.”

“Okay. Guess what I’m doing right now. With my feet. Under the table.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m keeping them flat on the floor. Absolutely flat. Have you ever seen a woman who isn’t a nun do that? Unless they’re too fat, they cross their legs. If they’re too fat, they sit with their knees jutting out. My knees are together. Do you know what I do when I’m waiting for the bus?”

“No.”

“I sit on the bench, if there is a bench, with my feet flat on the ground and my knees together. I keep my hands in my lap and I look down. I don’t read. I don’t look at the other people waiting with me. I don’t check out the traffic. It’s called custody of the eyes. Until a month or so ago, I’d spent seventeen years working very hard to practice it.”

“But it was only a month ago,” Pat pointed out. “Except for Theresa Cavello, all these women had been out of their orders for—well, for years.”

“I know. I don’t think it matters. I started looking around, you know, after I started going to Damien House, because every time I walked into that place someone I’d never seen before in my life would look me up and down and say, ‘nun.’ At first I thought it was just that people had heard about me—they knew I was Andy’s sister, they knew Andy’s sister was a nun. Later I realized it couldn’t have been that, because I ran into people who just knew on sight that I’d been a nun, who didn’t know who I was. So, like I said, I started watching.”

“And?”

“And,” Susan said, “as far as I can figure out, most of the traditional formation is impossible to get rid of. It gets to be too much of a habit—excuse the pun. It’s not just the way they—we—sit. Hands close to the sides, not swinging and not stuffed into pockets. Close to buildings or the edges of sidewalks. I can make myself look around at things while I’m walking, if I’ve got something interesting to look at and I decide I want to look at it. When I’m just walking, thinking about something else, I do the custody-of-the-eyes thing again. Then there’s the way I eat—”

“Eat?”

“When I first entered the convent, we had rules for eating every kind of food you could imagine. Actually, that’s a lot less stupid than it sounds. When you have to live in community with a bunch of women you don’t know, day after day, and you’ve got nothing in common with any of them except a vocation, little habits can get to be very irritating. So the traditional order used to—and I do mean used to, almost everybody has given this sort of thing up—anyway, we used to train everybody into the same habits. It reduced friction. I eat oranges with a fork—”

“With a fork,” Pat repeated.

Susan smiled again. “It’s worse than you think. I don’t just eat them with a fork, I very carefully dissect them into quarters with a knife first. Then I peel a quarter. Then I eat it with a fork. Then I peel another quarter. Then I—”

“Good grief,” Pat said, “Do you eat potato chips with chop-sticks?”

“No, but I’m totally incapable of not taking something that’s offered to me at dinner, and eating it, even if I hate it. I have an almost impossible time with small talk. I carry practically nothing in my purse. I have a very hard time shopping and when I do make myself shop I have to force myself to try things on. I feel so guilty when I look in a mirror, I put on makeup without the use of one. I—”

“All right,” Pat said. “All right. What about these ex-nuns you’ve been looking at? How much of this stuff lasts?”

“A lot. You can’t spend ten or fifteen or twenty years developing habits without having a hard time getting rid of them. The mirror thing especially. I don’t know what it is about the mirror thing, but we all have it. A phobia for glass.”

“Fine,” Pat said. “Fine. But what does this mean?
Is
he picking his victims up off the street at random? Just running into a lot of ex-nuns?”