The Big Bad City Read online

  It was still relatively early on Monday night.

  They hit the phones.

  5

  SHE WAS UPSET ABOUT HER BUDGET,” SISTER FELICIA LOCASTA SAID. “I THINK THAT’S WHY SHE CAME TO SEE ME THAT night. I was a math major in college before I joined the order. We often talked about money matters.”

  The detectives were back in Riverhead again, at the Convent of the Sisters of Christ’s Mercy, at the crack of dawn, and they were sitting in a little room off the chapel, where there was a coffee machine, a refrigerator, and a sink.

  “Please call me just Felicia, okay?” she said. “I mean, I know there are nuns who dig the sister bit, but they’re all a hundred years old.” Felicia was in her mid-thirties, a dark-eyed woman with curly black hair fastened at the back of her head with a simple ribbon. She was wearing jeans, loafers without socks, and a white T-shirt lettered with the words SISTERS OF CHRIST’S MERCY …

  “… which Sister Carmelita might not find appropriate,” she said, hitting the word hard, “but she’s in San Diego, and I’m here. Anyway, I am a Sister of Christ’s Mercy and I only wear this around here before I go to work, what time is it, anyway?”

  It was seven A.M. on August twenty-fifth, a blistering-hot Tuesday with the sun barely risen, an exaggeration, but, man, it was hot! Felicia had told them last night that she had to be at work by nine sharp, so if they wanted to talk to her they had to be at the convent by seven latest. Her work was teaching mathematics to the little deaf kids at the school next door, so if they could be out of here by eight, she could shower and dress like a proper nun before she faced the day.

  Carella wondered if he should mention that his wife was deaf.

  Funny, but he never thought of her as deaf.

  He let the moment pass.

  “Mary always had trouble making ends meet,” Felicia said, “I don’t know why, I kept telling her to ask Sister Carmelita to move her up here to the convent. We pool our resources here and I know it’s a lot cheaper than living alone in the city. But she said she wanted to be near the hospital. ‘You never know what’s going to happen,’ she used to say. ‘One of my patients might need me.’ She was very conscientious, you know. I was with her one night when she’d lost a patient and she was virtually inconsolable.”

  “Did she come up here often?”

  “Or I’d take the train into the city. We were close friends. I mean, we’re all united in Christ, all the sisters in the order, but you naturally gravitate to some people more than you do others. We became friends shortly after she came here from San Diego. We met through Annette. Her spiritual advisor? Have you talked to Annette?”

  “Yes, we have,” Carella said. “This would’ve been in February sometime, is that it? When you met Mary?”

  “February, March, along about then.”

  “How often did you see her?”

  “We got together for dinner every three weeks or so. Usually she came here, sometimes we met in the city.”

  “According to this,” Brown said, consulting Mary’s calendar, “she was here at the convent on the eleventh. That would’ve been a Tuesday night. She has you listed for six-thirty.”

  “Yes, that’s when we have supper here at the convent. Right after vespers. The evening prayer. You have to understand … this will sound terrible, I know, but, well, I’m sorry, but it’s the way it is. You see, we take vows of poverty, charity, and obedience. We are poor, we don’t simply pretend to be poor. So whenever Mary came here for supper … well … it was an extra mouth to feed, you see. We have a budget, too. So she chipped in for the meal. And we gratefully accepted whatever she could offer. Whatever her budget would allow.”

  “How about when you went out to eat together?”

  “Oh, we never went to anyplace fancy. You’d be surprised how many inexpensive little places there are in the city. We usually had pasta and a salad, a glass of wine. There are places that will let you sit and talk. We knew a lot of them,” she said, her eyes twinkling as if she were in possession of a state secret. “And in the spring and summer months, we’d walk. It was a gorgeous spring this year. There are a lot of very poor people in this city, you know. And not many of them had a choice in the matter. We chose this life. You must never forget that.”

  “When you say she was upset about her budget …”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Was that why she came to see you?”

  “Yes. I mean, we were good friends, she also wanted to spend some time with me and the other sisters. But the budget was on her mind, yes.”

  “Did you talk about anything but her budget that night?” Brown asked.

  “It was on her mind,” Felicia said. “That’s what we talked about mostly.”

  “Just you and Mary? Or did the other sisters join in?”

  “Just the two of us.”

  “And you say she was upset.”

  “Yes.”

  “Only about the budget?”

  “That’s all she told me about.”

  “Did she mention receiving a letter from anyone?” Carella asked.

  “No.”

  “Did she mention some kind of decision she’d made a few weeks ago?”

  “No.”

  “You just talked about her budget.”

  “Mostly. The difficulty she was having making ends meet. The trouble she was having with the vow.”

  “Of poverty, do you mean?”

  “Of poverty, yes. I’m not sure why it should suddenly have been such a burden. She’d been a nun for …”

  “Did she owe anyone money?” Brown asked.

  “No. Well, I’m sure she didn’t.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I’m sorry, but such a thing would never occur to me.”

  “She didn’t drink, did she?”

  “Not to excess, no. No. Of course not.”

  “Hadn’t developed any bad habits, had she?”

  “Is that a pun, Detective?”

  “Huh? Oh. No. I’m talking about bad habits like gambling or dope, your everyday bad habits.”

  The room went silent.

  “She was a nun, you know,” Felicia said.

  “We have to ask,” Brown said.

  “Do you?”

  She looked up at the wall clock. Brown figured he’d blown it. He waited for Carella to ask the next question. Carella was thinking he’d have a tough time pulling this one out of the fire. Felicia looked up at the wall clock again. He decided to bite the bullet, what the hell.

  “How much was she living on?” he asked. “Would you know?”

  “She got by.”

  “But she complained.”

  “Only to me. I was her closest friend. You can’t complain to God, gentlemen, but you can complain to friends. I told her she should have been used to it by now, what did she think poverty meant, champagne and caviar? I told her I could understand this if she’d just entered the order. But six years? Why did she take her final vows if she still had doubts? Why did she accept the gold ring of profession …?”

  “Did she say she had doubts?”

  “No, she simply said it was very difficult.”

  “All at once.”

  “I don’t know if it was all at once. Maybe she’d been thinking about it for some time. This was the first I’d heard of it.”

  “But you said you often talked about money matters.”

  “There is not a nun on earth who doesn’t talk about money matters.”

  “Had she ever complained about money matters before?”

  “Never.”

  “Why now?” Carella asked.

  “I don’t know why. A nun for six years,” Felicia said shaking her head. “Entered the order straight from college. Brown University, I think. So all of a sudden she hasn’t got enough money to spend? Can you understand that? I certainly can’t.”

  There had been mention of him last night on the eleven o’clock news, but he didn’t like them referring to him as The Cookie Boy,
which made him sound like some kind of fat little Pillsbury Doughboy you poked your finger in his belly and he giggled. He was not only a grown man—twenty-seven years old—but he was also tall and slender and quite good-looking if he said so himself. A skilled burglar besides. A professional burglar, mind you, who’d been entering apartments unobtrusively since he was twenty-two when he’d been discharged from the armed forces of the United States of America, in which he’d served honorably and nobly, go ask Mom. Not a single arrest in five years, either, and never hoped to get busted, thank you very much.

  The Cookie Boy.

  Didn’t like that name at all.

  Sort of diminished the whole point of what he was doing. Demeaned it somehow. This wasn’t some kind of dumb gimmick, this was a genuine attempt to transmute victims—he hated that word—into honest-to-God recipients. He was trying to create some sort of exchange here. No hard feelings, you understand? I know I’ve been in your apartment, I know I’ve taken with me some of your precious belongings, once very near and dear to you, but, alas, now gone. I want you to understand, however, that no malice was intended. This is what I do for a living, in much the same way that you’re a stockbroker or a nurse, a lawyer or a waitress. I am a burglar, and I want you to respect what I do, just as I respect what you do, just as I’ve shown respect for all your possessions while inside your apartment. I haven’t thrown things all over the floor, I haven’t left any kind of mess here, have I? I’ve left the place just the way I found it, except for taking a few things with me. And in return, because I truly don’t want you harboring any feelings of resentment or anger, I leave you these chocolate chip cookies I baked myself. Not as payment for your goods, I don’t want you to misinterpret the gesture. This is not an act of commerce. Rather, I think of it as an exchange of gifts. I thank you for your belongings, and I humbly offer this gift of my own, these delicious chocolate chip cookies baked by yours truly, from my own recipe, and offered with all my love. Low fat, no less.

  The windows were wide open because it was another hot morning—he did all his baking in the morning—and he was preheating the oven to three hundred and seventy-five degrees. Whenever he baked, which was every day except Sunday, he imagined people all over the neighborhood poking their heads out of similarly opened windows to sniff in the good, sweet aroma of his cookies wafting out on the still summer air. All of his ingredients were laid out on the kitchen table, his sugars and his margarine, his flour and baking soda, his vanilla and salt, his egg white and his chocolate chips. The oven was almost ready. He began mixing.

  First the half cup of granulated sugar and next the quarter cup of brown sugar. Then the quarter cup of softened margarine and the teaspoon of vanilla. All in a large bowl, mixed with a wooden spoon, his hand moving in circles, a smile on his face, oh how he loved doing this! Now he stirred in a cup of flour and a quarter teaspoon of salt, and then he dropped in his semisweet chocolate chips, a half cup of them, dribbling them in bit by bit, watching them fall like punctuation marks into the white mix, stirring them in, sniffing the air, smiling, opening the oven and feeling the good heat on his face, oh my. Onto an ungreased cookie sheet, he dropped his teaspoon-size bits of dough, spacing them about two inches apart, and then sliding the sheet into the oven, and setting the timer for ten minutes. The recipe was good for about fifty cookies.

  Smiling, sitting at the kitchen table now and drinking a cup of decaffeinated coffee, he imagined he could see, actually see, wave after wave of aroma rolling from the oven to the open windows across the room and out into the courtyard, drifting on the air, through the open windows across the way, above and below, floating into the apartments of grateful neighbors who could only wonder who on earth was baking these glorious treats, never once imagining that the baker was The Cookie Boy himself.

  This afternoon, in whichever apartment he burglarized, he would leave a dozen chocolate chip cookies in a little white box on the bed, resting on whichever pillow he supposed the lady of the house placed her head upon. A gift from The Cookie Boy, madam.

  A name he rather fancied, after all, now that he played it over and again in his mind.

  When they got to St. Margaret’s at nine-thirty that morning, the head nurse told them Rene Schneider and Jenna DiSalvo were in with a patient. They went down the hall to the visitors’ waiting room, and took chairs in a windowed corner overlooking the parking lot. Brown seemed unusually silent.

  “What are you thinking?” Carella asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You still upset?”

  “Yes, you want to know. I didn’t handle it right, I realize that. But I have to tell you, Steve, I don’t really care if they’re nuns or priests or whatever the hell they are, the mother superior, the pope himself. Somebody got killed here!”

  “Take it easy, Artie.”

  “I’m sorry, but what did I say that was so damn outrageous, can you please tell me? Is it impossible for a nun to have a drinking problem? Last night, Father Clemente said there were nuns who did.”

  “He also said Mary wasn’t one of them.”

  “Yeah, well, my mother told me it never hurts to ask the same question twice.”

  “She must’ve known my mother.”

  “I have to look at this person like a human being. And human beings borrow money. So what’d Sister Felicia get so upset about? Did I spit on her crucifix or something? I asked if Mary owed anybody money, big deal! She tells me Oh, gee, I’m terribly sorry, but such a thing would never occur to me! Why not? Mary all at once needs money, why’s it impossible that she owed somebody?”

  “She was a nun, Artie.”

  “So what? Can’t a nun bet on the horses? Can’t she buy crack on the street corner? Can’t she go play poker with other nuns? She lived in an apartment all by herself, Steve. Nobody was checking on her.”

  “God was checking on her.”

  “Oh, come on. Do you believe that?”

  “No. But I’m sure she did.”

  “Okay, why do you think she suddenly needed more money?”

  “Why do you?”

  “Blackmail,” Brown said.

  “Excuse me?”

  They both turned toward the entrance door. Two uniformed nurses were standing there, one of them blonde, the other dark-haired.

  “You wanted to see us?” the blonde said.

  The detectives rose. The nurses came into the room.

  “I’m Jenna DiSalvo,” the blonde said.

  “I’m Rene Schneider,” the brunette said.

  The detectives introduced themselves. The nurses apologized for the delay and told them they’d been doing a wet-to-dry dressing on a patient with a decubitus ulcer on his coccyx …

  “A pressure sore,” Jenna explained.

  “On his tailbone,” Rene explained.

  … which had taken two of them because he was too weak to keep himself rolled over on his side, and one of them had to hold him while the other one cleaned the two-inch hole with saline, and then packed the wound with saline-soaked gauze, and then put dry gauze and an ABD pad over that, and then paper-taped it. The whole dressing change had taken about fifteen minutes, which was why they were late, and again they apologized.

  Not for a hundred million dollars, Carella thought.

  The nurses, crisp and white in their pristine uniforms, looked unruffled but enormously wary. They knew that in police work a mandatory suspect was anyone who’d had contact with the victim in the proximate period before a murder. They’d also seen too many tabloid television shows about mistaken arrests and police brutality. The detectives were both wearing Dacron suits, rumpled in this heat, damp button-down shirts, silk ties that needed pressing. They looked tough. When Brown asked if they might talk to each of the women separately, the nurses knew positively that they’d both end up in a state penitentiary where they’d be sodomized by hardened criminals and sadistic guards.

  Jenna led Carella down the hall to the nurses’ lounge.

  Brown stayed here wi
th Rene in the visitors’ waiting room.

  Because she got the black cop, Rene figured she’d end up in the electric chair. She happened to be Jewish, and she knew blacks, the ingrates, didn’t like Jews. Because Jenna got the cop with the Italian name, she figured she’d get the electric chair, too. She happened to be of Italian descent herself, and she knew Italians didn’t trust other Italians.

  “Have a seat,” Brown said, as if the waiting room were his own living room. Rene took a seat on the sofa. Brown sat in an easy chair facing her. Rene cleared her throat and folded her hands in her lap. She was the prettier of the two women, and she knew it. But that wasn’t going to save her from the electric chair. Brown took a notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “August fourteenth,” he said. “That would’ve been the Friday a week before Mary Vincent was murdered.”

  · · ·

  “You’re listed in her calendar for seven o’clock that night,” Carella said. “You met at her apartment, is that right?”

  “Yes,” Jenna said. “For drinks.”

  “We went out to dinner afterward,” Rene said.

  “How much did she drink?” Brown asked.

  Never hurt to ask the same question three times, either.

  “She had a single glass of wine.”

  “Got there at seven, did you?”

  “I did. Jenna got there a bit later. We went separately.”

  “Where’d you go after you had your drinks?”

  “To a Chinese restaurant nearby.”

  “Would you remember the name of it?”

  “Ah Fong,” Jenna said.

  “Ah Wong,” Rene said.

  “Who paid for dinner?”

  “We split the check.”

  “We went Dutch.”

  “Was that Mary’s suggestion?”

  “No, we always worked it that way. Whenever we went out together.”

  “How often was that?”

  “Every two weeks,” Jenna said.

  “Once a month,” Rene said.

  “Did Mary mention anything about money?”