The Big Bad City Page 7

“DNR? Do Not Resuscitate. Big sign at the foot of the bed, DNR. Essentially, it means let ’em die.”

  Carella was thinking he wouldn’t do this kind of work for five million dollars.

  “One of our patients has prostate cancer that metastasized to bone,” Hall said. “Another has lung cancer that metastasized to bone and brain. We’ve got a bilateral amputee on the ward, he’s incontinent of stool, his skin’s broken down, and he’s got a permanent trache tube in his throat.”

  Not for ten million dollars, Carella thought.

  “This isn’t a fun ward,” Hall said.

  Mind reader, Carella thought.

  “Mary began working for me six months ago. Transferred here from a hospice in San Diego, which is where her mother house is. I believe she spoke to the major superior there, who referred her to the director of ministry. I’m glad they sent her here, believe me. Quite often, as was the case with Mary, a woman religious can be more devoted than the most dedicated doctor.”

  Carella, quick study that he was, figured that “woman religious” was the politically correct term for nun. Somehow, he preferred nun. Same way he preferred cop to police officer.

  “We have a hundred and ten beds here at St. Margaret’s,” Hall said. “Four hundred people on the staff, including the Christ’s Mercy nuns. The other hospital run by the order is even smaller. The government’s cutting back on funds, you know, and some seventy percent of our patients are either welfare or Medicaid recipients. The sisters are just scraping by, but they’re really committed to serving the poor. Last year St. Margaret’s had close to twenty-five-hundred admissions. There were twelve hundred clinic visits every month, nine hundred emergency-room visits, four hundred outpatient surgeries. This is a poor neighborhood. We’re much needed here. I’ll miss Mary sorely, I can tell you that. She was a thorough professional, and a wonderful person.”

  “Know anyone who may have felt otherwise?” Carella asked.

  “Not a soul. I’ve worked with nuns for the past ten years now, and they’re as different one from the other as any other women. I’m sure some of them may, in fact, be exactly like the childish little creatures or strict disciplinarians we see portrayed on television, giggling as they carry in the sheaves or snarling as they crack a ruler over the knuckles of a schoolboy. But I’ve never personally met a nun who fits the stereotype. For the most part, they are complex, intelligent women who share only one trait—their complete devotion to God. Mary considered her work here a divinely inspired gift. The nuns call it charism, you know, the work chosen for them by God. Mary’s work was particularly difficult. She labored for God tirelessly, dutifully, and cheerfully. I’d sometimes hear her …”

  His voice broke.

  “She’d … sometimes sing to the patients on the ward, she had a beautiful voice. There wasn’t anyone who didn’t feel enlightened and encouraged by her very presence. Everyone here will miss her.”

  “Were you working here last Friday, Doctor?” Carella asked.

  “Yes, I was.”

  “Did Mary seem her usual self?”

  “Yes, her same sweet self.” He considered this a moment, nodded, and said, “We worked on and off together all through the day. I saw no difference in her behavior.”

  “Nothing strange or …”

  “Nothing at all. She was her usual sweet self. I’m sorry to keep using that word. ‘Sweet’ can sometimes be misconstrued as insipid. But Mary had a manner that somehow soothed and at the same time cheered. A certain … sweetness, yes. In her smile, in her eyes. She seemed to be a completely realized human being, and as such she spread joy as if it were an infection. I’m sorry,” he said, and turned his face away for a moment. “I was very fond of her. We all were.”

  He pulled a tissue from the box on his desk, dabbed at his eyes, blew his nose. The detectives waited.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “Dr. Hall,” Brown said, “did she happen to mention where she might be going after work last Friday?”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “When was the last time you saw her that day?”

  “Let me think.”

  They waited.

  “Just before the shift ended, I would suppose.”

  “What time would that have been?”

  Helen Daniels had told them she and Mary had left the hospital together at a little past three. They were merely attempting to verify this now.

  “Two-thirty?” Hall said. “A quarter to three?”

  “Leaving the hospital, did you say?”

  “No, no. The shift ends at three. This would have been a little before then.”

  “Where’d you see her?”

  “Just outside the women’s locker room. Talking to one of the nurses.”

  “Which one? Would you remember?”

  “I’m sorry,” Hall said. “Her back was to me.”

  “How many nurses were on that shift?” Brown asked.

  “It varies from day to day.”

  “Would you have a record of who was here?”

  “Yes, certainly.”

  “Could we have it, please? Doctors, too,” Carella said.

  Hall looked at him.

  “Doctors, too, of course,” he said.

  What Sonny couldn’t figure out was why Carella and his partner—he assumed the big black dude with him was his partner and not his goddamn chauffeur—kept shuttling back and forth between St. Margaret’s Hospital and all these places had to do with religion. Saturday it was the convent up there in Riverhead. Now, at four in the afternoon, it was this church here on Yarrow, not too distant from the walk-up apartment building they’d gone to. Our Lady of Flowers it said in the letters chiseled over the arched front doors.

  You’d think the fuckin pope had got himself shot or something.

  Father Frank Clemente was a man in his fifties, wearing a black cotton sweater over black slacks and a black T-shirt. He looked a lot like a priest, Carella supposed, but he could have passed as well for any cool dude enjoying a cappuccino at an outdoor table on Jefferson Avenue. Instead, he and the two detectives sat on wrought-iron chairs as black as his attire, around a wide stone tabletop set on a stone pilaster, sipping lemonade the good father had himself made.

  “Mary was here for mass last week,” he said. “She …”

  “When last week?” Carella asked.

  “Tuesday night.”

  Three days before she was killed, Carella thought.

  “We had a drink together afterward.”

  Bottle of vodka in her fridge, Brown thought.

  “She seemed troubled,” Father Frank said. “She was normally so cheerful and outgoing, but that night …”

  He finds her somehow distant on this Tuesday night, the eighteenth day of August. It’s almost as if there’s a weight on her shoulders she wishes to share and yet is reluctant to reveal. He has known her since she came to this city in February, a prayerful nun who comes to mass at his church at least once, sometimes twice a week. He knows of her difficult ministry at St. Margaret’s, and he thinks at first she may have lost a patient today, so many of them are terminally ill. But no, it isn’t that, she assures him everything is fine at the hospital, everything just fine, Frank, thank you for your concern.

  Some nuns have drinking problems; some priests as well, for that matter. It is not an easy path they’ve chosen, and sometimes the hardships of the religious life can seem overwhelming. The church has programs for those unfortunates who need help, but Mary isn’t one of them, and neither is he.

  He keeps a bottle of twelve-year-old scotch in a cabinet in his study, and it is there that he mixes the drink for her. Two fingers of scotch in a tall Venetian glass Father Frank brought back from Italy when he had his audience with Pope John last summer. Three ice cubes. Fill the glass to the rim with soda. The same for himself. They carry the drinks out to the garden, and they sit here at this very same stone table he now shares with the detectives.

  The summer insects ar
e noisy tonight.

  They listen to the night all around them.

  “Is something troubling you?” he asks at last.

  “No, Frank.”

  “You seem … I don’t know. Withdrawn.”

  “No, no.”

  “If it’s something, please tell me. Perhaps I can help.”

  “Do you ever feel? …” she asks, and hesitates.

  He waits. He knows better than to press her. If she wishes to share whatever this is, she will of her own accord. He has heard her confession every week since she came to this city. She knows she can trust him. He waits.

  “That the past and the present …,” she starts again, and again stops.

  The noise of the insects seems suddenly deafening. He wishes there were a volume control, wishes he could tune out the sounds of the universe and peer directly into Mary’s mind, find there whatever it is that has cast this pall over her, help her to reveal it to him, reveal it to God for His understanding and mercy, His forgiveness if in fact there is anything to forgive.

  Yet he waits.

  Takes another sip of his drink.

  Waits.

  The insects are rowdy.

  “What I mean, …” she says. “Frank, do you ever feel that the past is determined by the present?”

  “You’ve got that reversed, haven’t you?” he says.

  “Not at all.”

  “You’re saying the present determines …?”

  “Yes, the past. What we do today determines what already happened yesterday.”

  “Are we about to get into a discussion of free will?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Determinism? Predestination?”

  “That’s not what …”

  “Double predestination? Calvinism? Am I back at the seminary?”

  “I’m not joking, Frank.”

  “How can you seriously suggest that the future determines? …”

  “Not the future. The present.”

  “In the past, Mary, the present is the future.”

  “Yes, but I’m talking about now. The immediate present.”

  “Can you give me a concrete example?” he says, thinking that if he can move her from the abstract to the specific, then perhaps he can get her to talk about what’s really troubling her. For surely, a metaphysical discussion isn’t what she …

  “Let’s say, for example …”

  She sips slowly at the drink.

  “Let’s say we’re sitting here enjoying our scotch …”

  “Which, in fact, we are doing.”

  “Here in the present. This moment is the present.”

  “It most certainly is.”

  “I’m sorry you think this is funny, Frank.”

  “Forgive me.”

  “What I’m trying to say is … do you think that our drinking this scotch, here and now in the present, somehow induced you to buy the scotch whenever you bought it?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I didn’t buy it. It was a gift from Charles. He brought it back from Glasgow.”

  “Then was his buying it, whenever that was …”

  “Three months ago.”

  “Was his act influenced by our drinking the scotch right this minute? Did he somehow know back then, three months ago in Glasgow, that you and I would be sitting here in your garden tonight … what’s today’s date?”

  “The eighteenth.”

  “July, June, May,” she says, counting backward. “On May eighteenth, did Father Charles know, or discern, or even prognosticate that tonight we’d be drinking the scotch he was at that moment buying in Glasgow? Did the present … tonight, August eighteenth, at … what time is it?”

  “Nine-thirty.”

  “Did this hour and this minute in this garden on this night determine his buying this scotch three months ago?”

  “I didn’t think it was that strong,” he says, and looks into his glass as if searching the drink for hidden potency.

  “I’m serious, Frank. Suppose, for example … well, just suppose a decision I made two Sundays ago … here at mass, in fact …”

  “What decision was that?” he asks at once.

  “It doesn’t matter. A decision. Let’s say a spiritual decision.”

  “All right.”

  “Do you feel my decision could have determined the contents of a letter written the day after I’d made the decision?”

  Frank looks at her.

  “What letter?” he asks.

  Even the insects seem suddenly still.

  “This is all supposition,” she says.

  “I realize that. A letter from whom?”

  “I told you. I’m theorizing.”

  “Did you receive a letter, Mary?”

  “This is all so silly, isn’t it?” she says. “Let’s talk about the real world, shall we?”

  The moment passes.

  The topic changes.

  He has lost her.

  She leaves the church at a little before ten, thanking him for the drink and telling him she’ll be here for mass again on Sunday.

  “But, of course … by Sunday, she was dead.”

  The garden was as still now as it must have been last Tuesday, when she came so close to telling him what was troubling her.

  “Had she really received a letter?” Carella asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  This time, they went equipped with a court order authorizing them to seize Sister Mary Vincent’s appointment calendar, her address book, and her budgeting notebook. The warrant also allowed them to search for and to similarly seize any correspondence addressed to her.

  Harding was not happy to see them again.

  He’d apparently been checking with a friend who was a cop or a lawyer or merely a student, and he’d been informed that the nun’s apartment was not a crime scene and the cops had no right bothering him every ten minutes to ask him to unlock the door for them.

  “That’s right,” Carella said. “You want us to kick it in?”

  “You got no right—”

  “Listen, mister, are you defying a court order?”

  Harding looked at him. “I’ll take you up,” he said grudgingly.

  Behind him, they labored up the steps to the sixth floor. Outside the door to 6C, they waited patiently while he fumbled with his key ring again. At last, he unlocked the door, opened it, and said, “Mind if I see that warrant you mentioned?”

  Carella showed it to him. Harding read it carefully, word for word, and then handed it back, and stepped aside for the detectives to enter the apartment.

  Someone had beat them to it.

  The place was a shambles.

  The refrigerator door was open, its contents swept out onto the kitchen floor. They could see into the bathroom, where the intruder had searched the medicine cabinet and the toilet tank, leaving the lid on the seat. The bed had been stripped. The closet door was open, Mary’s meager belongings strewn everywhere. The dresser drawers …

  “Window’s open here,” Brown said.

  The window was on the wall beside the dresser. It was locked the last time they were here. Now it was wide open. Several clay pots of blooming flowers were on the fire escape outside. One of the pots had been overturned in the intruder’s haste to leave.

  “See anybody in the backyard late this afternoon?” Carella asked.

  “Wasn’t in the backyard late this afternoon,” Harding said.

  “Would’ve been sometime after three,” Brown said.

  “Why then?”

  “That’s when we left here.”

  “Didn’t see anybody anytime cause I wasn’t in the backyard after I fixed that pulley.”

  “You got a hair across your ass, mister?” Brown said.

  “I don’t like cops shoving their weight around, that’s all,” Harding said.

  “Maybe you’d like to come to the station house, answer some questions there,” Brown said heatedly. “
Would you like to do that, sir?”

  “You got no reason to detain me,” Harding said.

  “Try obstructing the progress of a murder investi …”

  “Let it go, Artie,” Carella said.

  “Man’s beginning to annoy me! A woman’s been killed here, he’s acting like …”

  “Let it go,” Carella said again. “Let’s see if we can find that letter.”

  Harding stood just inside the door while they searched, his arms folded across his chest, a smug look on his face. Brown wanted to smack the bastard. In the night-table drawer, they found the various books they’d tried to remove from the apartment earlier …

  “We’ll be taking these now,” Carella said.

  Harding nodded.

  … but they did not find the letter Mary Vincent had mentioned to Father Clemente.

  Or any letter at all, for that matter.

  Not in the night table or anywhere else.

  “If you’re finished here,” Harding said, “I got work to do.”

  Brown was thinking of all the fire-department and building-code violations he’d noticed on the arduous climb up to the sixth floor: the burnt-out lightbulb on the first-floor landing, the airshaft window painted shut on the third floor, the exposed electrical wiring on the fifth floor, the stacked cardboard cartons obstructing passage on the sixth floor.

  He smiled like a Buddha.

  If Mary Vincent’s appointment calendar was a true indicator of her social life, the nun had been fairly busy during the two weeks preceding her death. The calendar listed:

  August

  11: 6:30 P.M.

  Felicia @ CM.

  August

  14: 7:00 P.M.

  Jenna and Rene

  Here.

  August

  15: 7:30 P.M.

  Michael @ Med

  August

  18: 6:00 P.M.

  Frank @ OLF

  August

  20: 5:00 P.M.

  Annette @ CM

  They had already talked to Father Frank Clemente at Our Lady of Flowers and Sister Annette Ryan at the Christ’s Mercy convent. A check of first names in Mary’s address book came up with the information that Felicia Locasta was a nun at Christ’s Mercy, Jenna DiSalvo and Rene Schneider were both registered nurses at St. Margaret’s, and Dr. Michael Paine was a physician at the hospital.