VC03 - Mortal Grace (44 page)

“Did Father Joe or Father Chuck ever ask you to give up hooking, or not to use condoms?”

Jonquil threw back her head and let out a throaty laugh. The laugh said,
I am Jonquil the Magnificent
,
completely at ease with who I am and what I am.
“As I’ve told you three times, we’re not discussing Father Chuck. So are we talking about Father Joe sober or Father Joe after he’s had a few? Because they’re two different people. Father Joe sober gives me condoms by the dozens—asks me to hand them out to the other girls.”

“And Father Joe drunk?”

“I don’t believe in violating client-hooker confidentiality.”

“The other hookers talked about a priest who drove around in a van and told them not to hook, not to use condoms.”

“Right. Drives a van with tear-drop windows, and
God Loves You
painted on the side. He likes to be called Damien—he’s a nut.”

There was no air conditioner. The room was warm, borderline uncomfortable, but an electric fan on the bureau sent ripples of jasmine through the damp air.

“You’ve met Damien?”

“Honey, I’ve met everyone.”

“Is Damien his real name?”

Her contact-lens-blue gaze glided silkily toward him. “No one uses a real name down in the Market.”

“How often is this Damien person down in the meat market?”

“No more often than Father Joe. There’s no pattern to it.” She stared at her toenails, sucked her breath in slowly, then leaned all the way forward and blew on them. “One week he’s there two, three times—then four months go by and you don’t see him.”

“How recently have you seen him?”

She screwed the top back on the nail polish bottle and stood. “Not lately.”

“Has Father Joe ever tried to involve you in s/m sex?”

“Some priests like it, some don’t.”

“Does Damien like it?”

“Damien’s a child. If it doesn’t kill him, he likes it.”

“And if it kills someone else?”

“He might still like it. Want me to ask him?”

“You’re playing games with me, aren’t you?”

“A few.”

“I need to know what Damien’s real name is.”

Jonquil adjusted her curly blond wig. Light blinked from an oversize emerald set into what looked like a high school class ring. She looked in the mirror, and then she looked at him. “How are you doing on that effort to get my parole shortened?”

Cardozo forced back his shoulders, stretching wide in the straight-backed chair, and got to his feet. “It’s in the works.”

Her eyes were suddenly crafty as a purebred cat’s. “You just make sure it stays in the works, honey, and you’ll be hearing from me.”

“I hope that will be soon.”

“As soon as you care to make it.”

Jonquil closed the door behind the police lieutenant and quickly locked it. The smile dropped off her face.

“It’s in the works,” she muttered.
“Bullshit!”

A siren screamed down Lexington Avenue. She slammed the window. Below, in the alley, gunfire rattled.

I am not interested
, Jonquil said.
I am not even going to look.

She yanked down the window shade and switched on the bureau light. She studied herself in the mirror.

She frowned. The mirror frowned back.

She liked mirrors.

She knew what to expect from them, whereas windows could shock—especially the windows of the George Washington Hotel.

She angled the silk lampshade, tipping a bit more glow onto her face. She smiled at her reflection, showing teeth.

She winced. The recession of those gums was as bad as anything the economy had gone through in the last ten years.

Time’s a-wasting
,
Jonq
, she reminded herself.
You are fast approaching the less-than-lovely age when no one in this world is going to do you any favors
—
you got one thing going for you, girl, and it’s not your pretty face or, your robotits
—
or your dick…

In the eighties she had seen a future for herself in New York. She’d thought if she sacrificed for the right number of years, saved the right amount of money, she’d have it made. But the city had changed. The future was decaying. The cannibals had taken over, and they were breeding more cannibals. Now, if she had a chance to get out, she knew she’d have to grab it.

She reached underneath the panties in the middle bureau drawer. She took out her account book. She sat on the edge of the bed and totaled up the money she had saved for the second stage of the operation. She calculated thirty-three hundred more would pay for the plane ticket and the hospital in Tangier—and then she could marry that New Jersey construction company owner who thought she was a woman….

As she turned the pages of the book, she was aware of loud, pulsing rap music pushing down from the room upstairs. She grimaced.

Girl
, she told herself,
there is only one way you are going to get your ass out of this roach motel alive.

She fluffed her wig, recentered it, tied a turquoise bandanna across her forehead. With a glide, a stride, a saunter, she stepped into the hallway and took the stairway down to the lobby.

She moved like a countess walking in her garden, like a woman entitled to anything in the world. She asked the desk clerk for change for the telephone. She went to the pay phone and punched in seven magic digits.

Three rings.

A man’s voice, recorded. “I welcome your call, but I am not available at present to come to the phone. At the signal, please leave your name, your number, and any brief message. I shall get back to you as soon as possible.”

“Hi, Father Damien?”

A babble of cracked-up voices floated over from the other side of the lobby. She pressed a finger over one ear.

“It’s your sinful little girl Jonquil—how ya doin’? Well, Father, I just been entertaining a big, hunky cop. He’s
very
interested in learning about s/m and I need to confess something
awful
.”

FIFTY-FIVE

“I
SEEMED TO REMEMBER,”
Dan Hippolito said, “that when I did the postmortems on Vegas and Ms. Basket Case, there was a film—a kind of residue of a matzolike substance in their mouths. But no such thing shows up in the autopsy reports in our computer.”

The blunt end of his ballpoint tapped two of the three reports. Cardozo, sitting with his hand against his cheek, leaned a little forward to get a clearer look at the documents on Dan’s desk. Fluorescent bulbs cast a jittery, nervous light.

“I do over four hundred postmortems a year,” Dan went on. “It’s been fourteen months since my last vacation—I figured maybe I was inventing memories. So I went back and reviewed my original notes.” He turned tattered sheets in an old spiral-bound notebook. “And there it was: residue of matzolike substance.”

He tapped his finger halfway down a page, turning the notebook around so Cardozo could see the notation.

“So I contacted Howie Sileson, who did the postmortem on Wills. Exactly the same story.” Dan sounded excited now, in a cautious way. His ballpoint tapped the third report. “According to the autopsy in the computer, there was nothing in Wills’s mouth but some sadly decayed teeth—but Sileson’s work notes showed a foreign substance, possibly matzo.”

In the corridor outside Dan’s office, voices passed. A moment later gurney wheels squealed.

“The matzo disappeared from three autopsy reports.” Cardozo stared at the reports and the reports seemed to stare back. “Seems a little coincidental.”

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I don’t even think it’s an accident. Someone deleted that information from the files.”

“How would they get access?”

“The how is easy. If you’re smart enough to push the power switch, nothing on that computer is secure. What baffles me is the why. Why would anyone
want
to go through old reports and remove every mention of matzo? If the kids had died of
tainted
matzo,” Dan said, “I could see the manufacturer might not want his product named. But as nearly as I can piece together from these reports, Gilmartin and Vegas and Wills were knocked out with drugs and then they were sawed open and bled to death. Matzo had nothing to do with it.”

“Maybe not in the way you’re thinking…” Cardozo’s eyes snapped up. “I remember you telling me you thought these matzo residues could have been communion wafers.”

Dan sighed. “Given the state of these corpses and the amount and condition of the residue, that would be tough to prove or disprove. Matzo and communion wafer are both yeastless bread. They break down the same chemically. The only difference is, some matzo is salted.”

“But not the matzo residue in these kids’ mouths.”

“No, not that Sileson or I found.”

“So it could have been communion wafer.”

“Vince, how many times do you want to go around this circle? All I’m going to answer is, it’s possible.”

“Was there wine in their stomachs?”

“The bodies were too decomposed to analyze the stomach contents.” Dan ran his forefinger along the edge of the Vegas printout. “You’re wondering if they had communion before they were killed.”

“Yes, I am.”

“That’s a sickening notion. How’d you come up with that one?”

Cardozo didn’t answer and Dan didn’t seem to expect him to.

“Communion works the other way around. Wafer first, then wine. There wouldn’t be wine in the stomach if there was still a wafer in the mouth.”

“Okay.” Cardozo reflected a moment. “Didn’t some churches used to have communion with just the wafer?”

Dan nodded. “The Catholics did. Communion in one kind. The priest got to have bread and wine, while the poor slobs in the congregation had to make do with plain unleavened salt-free bread.”

“So the residue still could fit the communion theory.”

“You really like that theory, don’t you? I’ll tell you why I don’t. A communion wafer’s a damned small quantity of food. Not enough to chew. Not enough to mix with your saliva. You swallow it clean. It’s highly unlikely there’d be residue, let alone this quantity of residue.”

Cardozo sat wondering. Suddenly it came to him. “Unless the killer was giving communion to a dead person.”

“You win, I surrender.” Dan raised both palms in the air as though they could fend off bullets. “Give communion in one kind to a dead person and you’d have residue. But you’d also have a pretty demented priest.”

Cardozo stepped from the street into the Fish and the Lamb. As the door shut behind him, the roar of the world sheared off and the smell of old bindings and herbs rushed up like a half-forgotten memory.

“And how did you make out in your search for Reverend Bonnie Ruskay’s works?” It was the same prematurely balding, bespectacled man who had waited on Cardozo before, but the we’re-old-friends smile was brand-new.

“I found one.
The Son of God Was Also a Daughter
.”

“That’s probably her best. Once you get past her questioning of tradition, she’s a wonderfully original thinker.”

“She’s also a friend we have in common.” Cardozo took out his shield case.

“She told me. I’m Ben Ruskay, her brother.”

“She told me,” Cardozo said.

Ben offered a hand. “How may I help you today?”

“I need some information. Where do Catholic churches get communion wafers?”

“Most in the East order them wholesale from a Carmelite convent in Wisconsin. That’s where we get ours.”

“And the Episcopal churches?”

“They could use the same source—though there’s an order of Episcopalian sisters that also makes them.”

“If you’re not a priest, where would you buy them?”

“Communion wafers?” There was a look of open startlement on Ben’s face. “If you’re not a priest, why would you want them?”

“Just assuming you did.”

“I suppose you’d have to go to a retail shop like us—we stock them in case a local church runs short.”

“Have you ever sold communion wafers to a non-priest?”

“That we knew wasn’t a priest?” Ben’s forefinger stroked his receding hairline. “The assumption is, anyone buying wafers is a priest or a nun. In fact, most people buying from us are old regulars. On the other hand, we’re not a gun shop. We don’t require an ID.”

“Then you’d sell to anyone wearing a clerical collar.”

“And to any nun or any layperson claiming to be buying on behalf of a church.”

“Have any new customers bought wafers in the last three years?”

For an instant Ben’s dark eyes were two nests of frown lines. “I’m not always in the shop. I wouldn’t necessarily know a new customer. But I could look it up.”

“If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Not at all.” Ben stepped toward his desk in the rear of the shop. “And perhaps you need the names of other shops in the metropolitan area that sell communion wafers?”

“Thanks. That would be a help.”

“I’d like to keep the originals of those runaway photographs,” Lou Stein said. “Did you notice they have scratches on them?”

“I noticed they were pretty beat-up. What kind of scratches?”

“Patterned scratches. Could be handwriting. I’d like to play around with them.”

“Play with them, Lou. Have a ball.”

“The Pablo Cespedes photo too.”

“He’s all yours.”

“By the way, Eff’s a secretor. We recovered blood cells from the Ruskay semen. Type A-positive.”

Cardozo felt the muscles of his stomach knot.

“The good news for Bonnie Ruskay is, the blood tests HIV-negative.”

Cardozo wanted to believe it, but he had to wonder. “How can a hustling lowlife like Eff be antibody negative?”

“Freaky things happen with HIV. Maybe he’s been lucky. Maybe he’s been careful.”

“He wasn’t careful with her.”

“Just in case he’s raped anyone else, I’ve sent samples up to Lifeways for DNA matching.”

“How long will that take?”

“I told them to rush it. A day or two.”

“Thanks, Lou.” Cardozo hung up the phone. He slowly became aware of an almost palpable prickling of the skin on the back of his neck. He turned in his chair.

Ellie stood in the doorway. “Your line was busy.” She was watching him like an animal tuning in with its sixth sense. “You had a call.”