VC03 - Mortal Grace (40 page)

“Sis, that’s awfully close to perjury.”

“Don’t worry—he didn’t show up.”

“Did the police actually
say
they suspect Joe?”

“Not in so many words. But there’s circumstantial evidence. He hired one of the dead teenagers to work around the rectory. They even asked me about Wright Vanderbrook and Joe. They keep coming back to Joe’s sex habits.”

“Does he have sex habits?”

“Of course not.” She watched her brother drain the last of his coffee. “They got an anonymous note.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“It was on church stationery.”

“Maybe they think you sent it. Did you?”

“Of course I didn’t.”

“They’re testing you. They haven’t got a case, so they’re seeing if they can break you down till you tell them what you know.”

“I’ve told them the truth.”

“Know something, Sis? You haven’t got a thing to worry about. And neither does Father Joe, with you in his corner.”

She sighed. “Thanks for dinner. And for listening. Next time’s on me.”

They said good-bye on the sidewalk. It was a mildly humid night.

Ben laughed and hugged her. “And don’t you dare worry.”

He hailed a cab for her and she kissed him good night.

Fifteen minutes later, Bonnie stepped out of a cab and stood on the rectory doorstep, looking through her purse for the key.

Something made a scraping sound on the pavement behind her.

She angled her head around, tracking the sound, and peered into the smoky night. Parked cars lined the empty sidewalk. Shadows spilled from darkened doorways.

Only my imagination. Too much wine, too much coffee.

She let herself into the rectory and felt along the wall for the light switch. Overhead, a light bulb flickered and flashed like a gunshot and went out.

She stood a moment in the darkness, trying to connect with her own breathing. A short, shrill warbling sound startled her. The burglar alarm was flashing its tiny green lights, demanding that she punch in her code.

She tapped four buttons. The alarm fell silent. She waited to see if it really meant it or was just pretending.

It seemed to mean it.

She gave the street door a shove shut and reached to slide the bolt. The alarm began yelping again and the door flew back against her hand.

A shadow pushed through the wedge of light.

Her body gave a jump inside her clothes.

The shadow had weight. And speed. And a voice. A boy’s voice. “I have to talk to you.”

She froze.

In light slanting through the fan window, she could see the outline of a turned-around baseball cap. She had the impression the shadow was smiling.

“It’s me. Eff.”

She stepped back. “What do you want?”

“Punch in your code. Otherwise they send someone.”

“Tell me what you want.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t get to the precinct. My mom had an accident. She’s—” His voice broke. “I need to talk to someone.” He struck a match. “Can you see the buttons?”

She gazed at this young man with his desperate eyes and the sad bravado of his blond ponytail.
What do I feel for Eff Huffington?
she asked herself. She searched her heart and was ashamed to find a complete blank.

“I wouldn’t blame you if you told me to drop dead, but the doctors say she’s not”—he began sobbing—“she’s not going to make it.”

Her counselor’s instinct told her she was standing three feet from real pain. Maybe not the pain he claimed—maybe a different, darker, unnamed pain—but pain nonetheless.

She hesitated only an instant. She tapped her code into the box. The electronic yodeling stopped. “Come with me. We can talk down here.”

She led him to her office. The air conditioner pulsed like a weary heart. She drew the curtains.

“Make yourself comfortable. Have a seat.”

He didn’t sit. She watched him examine the photos on her desk.
If I can’t figure him out
, she told herself,
at least I can put a human face on him.

“Are you thirsty? Would you like something to drink? A snack?”

She brought things from the little refrigerator beneath the bookcase: a bowl of fruit, a plate of cold cuts, jars of mayonnaise and mustard and relish, two pop-top cans of ginger ale. She arranged them on the desk top, giving herself time to find the words she wanted to say.

“How did your mother’s accident happen?”

The silence in the room seemed to stick like gelatin. He studied the objects on the desk. She felt him sizing her up through her possessions.

Finally he went to the refrigerator and reached behind the orange juice. He brought out a bottle of beer.

She looked at him, surprised. “That’s Carlsberg. It’s Danish—you may not like it.”

An odd smile curled up one corner of his mouth. “Beer’s beer.” He felt around the side of the refrigerator for the magnetized bottle opener. It was as though he’d known it was there. He popped the top off the beer bottle. It rolled across the rug. He made no move to pick it up.

She set a coaster on the edge of the desk near him. “What hospital is your mother in?”

He didn’t answer.

She waited him out.

He lifted the bottle and toasted her.
“Salud.”
He took a long swallow. His T-shirt was wet through at the armpits and plastered to his chest. A stream of Carlsberg ran over his lower lip and trickled down his chin.

He set the bottle down on the desk beside the coaster. He wasn’t exactly testing a limit, but she could feel him nudging it.

“That’s bad for the wood.” She moved the bottle onto the coaster.

He was tapping something against the knuckle of his left thumb. He opened his fist and she saw it was a switchblade knife.

Her stomach went into free-fall.

“You are one dumb bitch. I’ve been following you. I know everywhere you go. I can get you anytime.”

He flicked the blade open. The walls of the office seemed to close in and the loudest sound was the beating of her own heart.

“I want my money.”

Bonnie drew in a long breath and slowly exhaled. “I haven’t got money here.”

“I want my ten thousand.”

“You’ve searched this place, you know there’s no cash here.”

With a sudden force that was completely crazy, he rammed her backward against the desk. The sour, almost rancid smell of his body engulfed her. “Yo, bitch. You pay—or I play.”

Holding her down with one arm, he touched the tip of the blade to her throat. Heat radiated from the steel, stinging through her.

He kissed her on the mouth, hard, his tongue a sour jab of beer.

He pulled back, grinning. “Better start saying your prayers, bitch. ʼCause playtime do be commencing.”

FIFTY-ONE

I
T WAS JUST AFTER
four in the morning when the phone beside Cardozo’s bed jangled. He was still half asleep as he lifted the receiver. “Cardozo.”

“Vince…it’s Bonnie.”

Something jagged and breathless in her voice alerted him. He pushed himself up to sitting and clicked on the light. “What’s the matter?”

“That boy was here. Eff Huffington.”

Cardozo felt his heart muscles contract.

“He had a knife. He—” She began stuttering.

“Take it easy. What did he do?”

There was an awful silence and even before she said it, he knew exactly what Eff Huffington had done to Reverend Bonnie Ruskay.

“He raped me. For six hours. He said he’ll be back for more unless I give him his money.”

“Have you washed?”

“Have I…no, I haven’t washed.”

“Don’t. Don’t throw anything out, don’t clean up, don’t touch anything. I’m coming up right now.”

Terri stood in the hallway in her bathrobe, staring at her father with shocked eyes. “What’s happened?”

“The son of a bitch attacked her.”

When she opened the door of the rectory, her eyes were swollen and dead. There was nothing in them, not hate, not fear. Her raincoat was trembling and Cardozo saw that the collar of the dress beneath it was torn.

“Come on. My car’s over here.”

She let him take her hand. Her touch was cold. “Where are we going?”

“I’m taking you to the hospital.”

In the car as they were heading down Lexington, she began tearing at her face, forcing her eyelids and lips apart. A wordless sound pushed out of her throat. He reached with his right forearm and eased her hands down.

“Don’t. Please don’t.”

He placed her hands on the dashboard. She stared at them as if they had preceded her into death.

“You’re safe,” he said. “It’s over.”

The emergency room was a Third World bazaar under rocket attack, faces screaming in a dozen languages, telephones jangling, stretcher wheels screeching, nurses’ heels clattering. A fire alarm clanged every ninety seconds and no one reacted.

He used his ID to get her into an examining room. A young woman doctor helped her out of her raincoat.

A hammer dropped in Cardozo’s heart when he saw that the dress underneath was a checkerboard of bloodstains.

“He didn’t use a condom.” Bonnie Ruskay had the voice of an automaton, without inflection or color. The expression on her face was not just pained but completely baffled. “Please test me for HIV.”

“The antibody doesn’t show immediately. We’ll test you later. For the moment, this will calm you.” The doctor slid a needle into her patient’s arm.

Cardozo watched Bonnie melt slowly down and down into a space of drugged and grateful nonbeing. He felt sick for her, sick for the city. This was what it was coming to.

The hospital kept her overnight.

He stayed in her room, guarding her. During the night she reached for his hand.

Cardozo stood staring at Ellie Siegel’s desk with its neat arrangement of paperwork
in
, paperwork
out
; its single perfect white carnation sitting in a blue glazed vase the size of a pill bottle. A determined effort had been made to separate that desk top from the confusion of the squad room around it.

Ellie’s fingers slowed on the typewriter keyboard. She looked over at him.

“Bonnie Ruskay was raped last night,” he said.

“Oh, my God.” Ellie’s face turned pale. She moved a stack of files from a chair to her desk top. “Sit. Talk.”

He sat. Didn’t talk. Just sat.

“How’s she doing?” Ellie said quietly.

“She’s coming apart.”

Ellie handed him a full coffee mug. “Here. I haven’t touched it.”

“It was that kid that’s been stalking her. Eff Huffington. I hate that kid. I hate what he’s done and what he is. This used to be a town where decent people could live. I’ll be damned before I let this city roll over dead because of a bunch of punk savages.”

“Sometimes you sound just like me.”

“I’m assigning her a round-the-clock guard.” He raised the mug and allowed a thin dark trickle to pass through his lips. The coffee tasted sludgy and bitter, as if it had been thickening in the bottom of the coffeemaker for the better part of a week. “Greg Monteleone and Tom O’Bannon will work twelve-hour shifts.”

Ellie was watching him, her eyes big and pained beneath sunken lids. “I’m sorry, Vince. I really am.” She reached out with the tip of a tissue. “Hold still. You’ve got a piece of apple Danish on your chin.”

He gazed at Ellie, feeling the soft mothering touch of her finger. “Thanks.” He pushed up from the chair and headed toward his cubicle.

“What’s your rush?”

“Huffington gave Bonnie an address. I wrote it somewhere in my notebook.”

“Probably phony,” Ellie warned.

“Doesn’t hurt to make sure.”

The
Oprah Winfrey Show
was blasting through the door. Cardozo pushed the buzzer. There was no spring to the button and he had a feeling the wiring was dead. He knocked.

When no one answered, he pounded.

A tall man with acne and a graying red beard opened the door. Finally.

“I’m looking for Eff Huffington.”

The man pushed out a dazed silence.

“Francis Huffington. I want to talk to him.”

A woman in jeans crossed the room and turned down the TV.

“Huffington. He lives here. Which one of you is Snyder?”

“We’re both Snyder.” The woman eased the man aside. She had a helmet of chemically blond hair and lips the color of spit on pink bathroom tile. “Who are you?”

Cardozo showed her his shield. “I’m looking for Francis Huffington, also known as Eff. In case the name’s not familiar, he’s the kid you’re boarding for the city’s foster care service.”

“You don’t have to get smart-ass. What do you want with him?”

“I’m a cop—figure it out.” Cardozo did a body swerve around her and pushed past the door into the apartment.

The furniture looked like a team of black belts had been using it for karate practice. An eight-year-old Hispanic girl was moving the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner along the edges of carpet that had been wall-to-wall somewhere else.

“It’s not our job to keep him out of trouble.” The woman was shouting. “We haven’t got eighteen hands. We’re not responsible for that kid’s behavior.”

“Where is he?”

“How do I know?”

“You and Mr. Snyder are drawing seven hundred a month untaxed to know where he is, that’s how you know.”

“He’s at therapy.”

“When does he get back from therapy?”

Mrs. Snyder turned. “Isn’t today his drug counseling day, Alvin?” She pitched her voice like a cue in a rehearsal.

“Right.”

“He goes to drug counseling after therapy. Then he’s got an hour before vocational training and he usually doesn’t bother to come home till afterward.”

Cardozo wondered exactly how many bureaucrats and civic freeloaders were making bucks off this kid. “How often do you see this foster child of yours?”

“Every day.” Something in her eyes backed off. “Every other day.”

“Where’s his room? The city pays you to give him a room; where is it?”

“Hey, come on now.” The man’s voice was low and he sounded terminally exhausted. “Let’s just sit down and break out some Rolling Rock and talk about this.”

“Screw talking about it.” Cardozo strode down the hallway, pushing doors open.