The Big Bad City Read online

“We may surprise you,” Kling said, and smiled.

  “Surprise Mr. Cookie instead,” she said.

  The message from a woman named Annette Ryan was waiting on Carella’s desk when they got back to the squadroom. It said that she could identify the dead nun whose picture she had seen on television this morning, and asked that he please call her. When he reached her at two that afternoon, he discovered that Annette Ryan was Sister Annette Ryan, who told him she’d been Mary Vincent’s spiritual director ever since she’d come to this city from the order’s mother house in San Diego. Carella asked if he might come to see her, and she gave him the address of her convent in Riverhead. He put the phone back on its receiver, and turned to where Brown was settling in behind his own desk.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” he suggested.

  The Honda Sonny Cole was driving had been loaned to him by a nineteen-year-old girl he’d met three months ago. He’d been seein her on and off the past month or so, movies and such, all that datin shit. She was willin to slobber the Johnson when her mama wasn’t home, but fearful of doing the major push, fraid she’d get pregnant. So much easier with hookers, you didn’t have to go through none of this courtship bullshit, none of these restrictions. One thing Sonny hated was restrictions.

  “Why do you need to follow this man?” Coral had asked him. The whole name put on her by her Southern mama was Coralee, but she’d shortened it to Coral the minute she got to be fifteen and learned where it was at. Coral was a sophomore at Ramsey University, studying to be a television broadcaster. Clean as a baby’s first tooth. Do it clean, man, cause you the first one they goan come lookin for. Clean piece, no partners, in, out, been nice to know you.

  “He owes me money,” Sonny said. “He knows I’m after him, he’ll skip town.”

  “So you need to follow him in my car.”

  “Any car, actually. Be nice if you lent me yours, though.”

  “Why don’t you just go up to him and ask him for the money?” Coral asked.

  “Doesn’t work that way, honey,” he said.

  “Why does he owe you this money, anyway?”

  So Sonny had wrote a whole big story out of thin air, told her how the man was a police officer married to his first cousin …

  “Your cousin’s married to a cop?” Coral said.

  “Was. They split up three months ago.”

  “Gee,” Coral said.

  What it was, Sonny explained to her, his cousin had been in the hospital needing a costly operation and Sonny had gone to his bank and withdrawn practically his entire life savings to lend to the husband cause he’d saved his life out there in the desert during the fracas in the Gulf, all bullshit, and now the girl had recovered, Sonny’s first cousin, and Sonny had asked him for the money back because he had a large business opportunity looming, but the man had since separated from her and Sonny was now trying to find out where he’d moved, or his cousin either, for that matter, because last time he’d gone to their apartment the landlady told him they’d both left for God knew where, all of it bullshit, which is why he was following him so he could maybe find where his cousin was, you see, the one had the thing done on her kidney, cost twenty thousand dollars of Sonny’s hard-earned cash, maybe plead on her kindness to intercede with her husband, who Sonny thought until now was one of his closest friends on earth, all of which was merely blowin smoke up Coral’s skirt.

  But it had got him the loan of the car.

  Sonny was a good driver. Stayed nailed to the blue Chevy sedan up ahead, but at the same time kept a respectable distance behind. Next few days he’d learn the whereabouts and wherewithals of every move Carella made. Find a place he could lay in wait and cold-cock him. Had to catch him alone. Bang him from behind. Goodbye nemesis, which in the dictionary said, “A person who inflicts relentless vengeance or destruction”—he’d looked it up the minute his lawyer paid the bail and popped him.

  Meanwhile, careful was the thing. Slow and easy. These were cops he was following, so presumably they knew all about tails. Oreo pair again, he noticed. Did the police department deliberately team up brothers and honkies to keep the peace? He had nothing but contempt for brothers who joined the enemy camp. Where the hell were they going, anyway?

  The Convent of the Order of the Sisters of Christ’s Mercy was located on a tree-lined street in a section of Riverhead that could easily have passed for a small New England village. On this hot summer afternoon late in August, butterflies floated above the flowers lining the path that led to the arched wooden door of the modest stone building where Sister Annette Ryan and eleven other nuns made their home. There was a cemetery on one side of the convent, and on the other a smaller stone building. A nun in habit was a rare sight these days, but the sister who answered their ring was at least seventy years old, and she was wearing the simple black-and-white habit of the order, a wooden crucifix hanging around her neck, a slender gold band on the third finger of her left hand. She led them down a hushed unadorned corridor and knocked discreetly on the arched door at its end.

  “Yes, come in, please,” a woman’s voice said.

  Sister Annette Ryan …

  “Please call me Annette,” she said at once.

  … was a tall, slender woman in her late fifties, Carella guessed, wearing tailored slacks, a pale blue cotton sweater, and low-heeled walking shoes. She had high cheekbones and a generous mouth, graying red hair cut close, eyes that matched the patch of lawn sparkling in the cloister beyond the arched and leaded windows of her study. She introduced the nun who’d answered the door as Sister Beryl, possibly in deference to her age, and then offered the detectives tea.

  “Yes, please,” Brown said.

  “Please,” Carella said.

  “How do you take it?” Sister Beryl asked. “Milk? Lemon? Sugar?”

  “Just milk in mine,” Brown said.

  “Lemon, please,” Carella said.

  Sister Beryl smiled graciously and scurried off. To Carella, nuns in habit always seemed to be moving fast, like windup toys. Perhaps because their means of locomotion was hidden by the long voluminous skirt. The door whispered shut behind her. The book-lined study went still again. Outside, Carella could hear the sound of a sprinkler tirelessly watering the lawn.

  “Not good news,” Annette said, and shook her head in disbelief.

  “Not good,” he agreed.

  “Do you have anything yet?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How can I help?”

  “Well, we know where she worked …,” Carella said.

  “That’s recent, you know.”

  Brown was already consulting his notebook.

  “Six months, we have. From a nurse named Helen Daniels.”

  “Yes, that’s correct. St. Margaret’s is one of the three hospitals conducted by the sisters. Our order was founded expressly for the care of the sick, you see, especially the impoverished sick. That was a long time ago, of course. 1837, in fact, in Paris. The charism has changed somewhat over the years …”

  Charism, Carella wondered, but did not ask.

  “… to include teaching of the handicapped. We run a school for the deaf next door, for example, and another for the blind, in Calm’s Point.”

  Carella wondered if he should mention that his wife was deaf and that he did not consider her handicapped. He let the moment pass.

  “Mary was working with terminally ill patients. She was marvelous with the sick.”

  “So we understand,” Carella said.

  “A prayerful nun,” Annette said. “And a unique individual. She was only twenty-seven, you know, but so mature, so compassionate.”

  She turned her head aside for an instant, perhaps to mask a tear, her gaze falling blindly on the open leaded window beyond which the sprinkler persisted. There was a knock at the door. Sister Beryl came in bearing a tray, which she set on a low table.

  “There we go,” she said, sounding remarkably sprightly for a woman her age. “Enjoy.”

  “Th
ank you, Sister Beryl.”

  The old nun nodded, surveyed the table as if she had not only made the tea but the tray upon which it sat. Pleased with what she saw, she nodded again, and hurried out of the room, the skirt of her black habit whispering along the stone floor.

  “Where had Mary worked before?” Carella asked. “You said the job was recent …”

  “Yes, she’d just come here from San Diego. That’s where our mother house is. Actually, just outside San Diego. A town named San Luis Elizario.”

  “So then you’ve only known her since she came east,” Brown said.

  “Yes. We met in March. Our major superior called me from San Diego and asked that I help get Mary settled here.”

  “Your major? …”

  “What we used to call mother superior. Times have changed, you know, oh how they’ve changed. Well, Vatican Two,” she said, and rolled her eyes as if mere mention of the words would conjure up for them the sweeping reform that had swept the church in the sixties. “Even major superior is a bit outdated. Some communities have gone back to calling her the prioress. But she’s also called the president and the provincial and the superior general and the provincial superior and the delegate superior or even simply the administrator. It can get confusing.”

  “Was Mary Vincent living here?”

  “You mean here at the convent? No, no. There are only twelve of us here.”

  “Then where did she live?” Brown asked.

  “She was renting a small apartment near the hospital.”

  “Are nuns allowed to do that?”

  Annette suppressed a smile.

  “It’s different nowadays,” she said. “The focus today is less on the group than it is on the individual.”

  “Can you let us have that address?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “And the name and phone number of the major superior in San Diego.”

  “Yes, certainly,” Annette said.

  “When you say you were Mary’s spiritual director,” Brown said, “what do you mean?”

  “Her advisor, her guide, her friend. Everyone needs someone to talk to occasionally. Women religious have problems, too, you know. We’re human, you know.”

  Women religious, Carella wondered, but again did not ask.

  “When’s the last time you talked?” he said.

  “The day before yesterday.”

  “This past Thursday?” Brown said, surprised.

  “Yes.”

  Both detectives were thinking she’d come to see her spiritual director on the day before she was killed. Both detectives were wondering why. Brown picked up the ball.

  “Was she having a problem?” he asked.

  “No, no. She just felt like talking. We saw each other every few weeks. Either she’d come here to the convent for dinner or I’d meet her in the city.”

  “So this wasn’t an unusual visit.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Nothing specific on her mind.”

  “Nothing.”

  “No spiritual problems.”

  “None that she mentioned.”

  “Did anything at all seem to be troubling her?”

  “She seemed her usual self.”

  “Mention any threatening phone calls …?”

  “No.”

  “Or letters?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone lurking about the building where she lived?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone unhappy with the nursing care she was giving?”

  “No.”

  “Perhaps a relative or friend of someone she was treating.”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “Anyone with a minor grievance …”

  “She didn’t mention anyone like that.”

  “… or petty annoyance?”

  “No one.”

  “Any idea what she was doing in Grover Park yesterday?”

  “No.”

  “Did she mention she might be going to the park?”

  “No.”

  “Was it a usual thing for her to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Walk all the way crosstown to the park? Sit on a bench there?”

  “I can’t imagine her doing that.”

  “She didn’t say she went there to pray or anything, did she?” Brown asked. “Or meditate? Anything like that?”

  “No, she prayed at home in the morning. For half an hour to forty-five minutes, before leaving for the hospital. And she went to mass once or twice a week.”

  “Where would that be?”

  “The church?”

  “Yes.”

  “Our Lady of Flowers. I’ll give you the address there as well, if you like. And the name of the parish priest.”

  “Please,” Carella said.

  Annette rose majestically and swept across the room just as if she were still wearing the habit. She opened the drawer on a long rectory table, and removed from it a leather-bound address book. Over her shoulder, as she began leafing through the book, she said, “Please find who did it, won’t you?”

  It sounded almost like a prayer.

  It was five minutes past three when they got back to the squadroom and called the mother house in San Luis Elizario. The woman to whom they spoke identified herself as Sister Frances Kelleher, assistant to the major superior. She was shocked and dismayed to learn of Mary Vincent’s death, and apologized for the absence of Sister Carmelita, who was in Rome at the moment.

  “She’s expected back in three days, if you’d like to try again,” she said.

  Carella marked the date on his calendar: August 25.

  “Actually,” he said, “we’re trying to locate a next of kin we can notify. Would you have any information regarding her family?”

  “I’m sure we do,” Sister Frances said. “Let me transfer you to the records office.”

  The nun in the records office answered the phone with a cheerful, “Louise Tracht, good morning,” and then immediately said, “Oops, it’s ten past noon already.”

  “Good afternoon then,” Carella said, and identified himself, and gave her much the same information he’d given Sister Frances. Again, there was the shocked reaction, though Sister Louise admitted she hadn’t known Mary all that well. “Let me check her file,” she said, and was gone from the phone for perhaps two or three minutes. When she returned, she said, “Both her parents are dead, but I have an address and phone number for a brother in Philadelphia, if you’d like that.”

  “Please,” Carella said.

  Vincent Cochran was asleep when Carella reached him at three forty-five that Saturday afternoon. He told Carella at once that he was a stand-up comic and that he didn’t get to bed till sometimes seven, eight in the morning …

  “So what’s this about?” he asked.

  The man sounded annoyed and cranky. This was perhaps not the most opportune moment to tell him about his sister’s murder. Carella took a deep breath.

  “Mr. Cochran,” he said, “I hate to be bringing you this kind of news, but …”

  “Has something happened to Anna?” Cochran asked at once.

  Carella didn’t know who Anna was.

  “No, it’s your sister,” he said, and plunged ahead. “She was murdered last night in Grover Park here.” Silence on the other end of the line. “We were able to make positive identification only this morning.” The silence lengthened. “We got your name and phone number from her mother house in San Diego. I’m sorry to bring you such news.”

  Silence.

  “Am I speaking to her brother, sir?”

  “Once upon a time,” Cochran said.

  “Sir?”

  “When she was still Kate Cochran, yes. I was her brother before she became Sister Mary Vincent.”

  “Sir?”

  “Before she became a nun.”

  There was another silence on the line.

  “Mr. Cochran,” Carella said, “your sister’s remains are currently at th
e Buena Vista morgue here in Isola. If you’d like to make funeral arrangements …”

  “Why would I?” Cochran said. “The last time I even talked to her was four years ago. Why would I want to see her now?”

  “Well, sir …”

  “Tell her beloved church to bury her,” he said. “Maybe that way she’ll get to heaven sooner.”

  There was a click on the line.

  Carella looked at the phone receiver.

  “Is he coming up?” Brown asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Carella said.

  Carl Blaney had violet eyes, somewhat too exotic for a medical examiner, perhaps, but there they were nonetheless, neither blue nor gray but as violet as Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes were supposed to be. Rather sad eyes as well, as if they’d seen far too many internal organs in far too many degrees of trauma.

  He greeted Carella in the mortuary at ten to five that Saturday afternoon and had the decency not to mention that he was almost three hours late, their scheduled meeting having been for two. Carella instantly explained that he’d had to shlepp all the way up to Riverhead in ninety-degree heat on clogged roadways, and then had to make some phone calls when he finally got back to the squadroom, all of which impressed Blaney not a whit.

  He told Carella that nobody here at the morgue was in any hurry, anyway, and besides he’d only just finished the autopsy on the woman who’d come into the morgue as an unidentified Jane Doe, had immediately been dubbed Jane Nun, and then Jane None, after a mortuary wag discovered she still hadn’t been identified—a situation now rectified, or so Carella informed him.

  Even Blaney’s initial examination had revealed the extensive bruising characteristic of manual strangulation. The bluish-black fingertip bruises, oval in shape, somewhat pale and blurred. The crescent-shaped fingernail marks. But he had then raised the shoulders on a head block, eviscerated the body, and removed the brain, allowing the blood to drain from the base of the skull. When the blood flow from the chest also stopped, Blaney began his examination of the intact neck organs. He made his first incision just below the chin, allowing him clear and unobstructed scrutiny without the necessity of handling the organs before dissection.

  “In manual strangulation,” he explained, “fractures of the larynx are common. I was searching for the horns because those are particularly weak parts of the thyroid cartilage and therefore …”