When the door opened and Wilson stepped into the apartment, Reardon saw that he was carrying a pistol in his right hand. For a moment Wilson did not move.
Then Mathesson shot up from behind the sofa. “Police!” he shouted. “Don’t move!”
Over the barrel of his own gun Reardon saw Wilson level his pistol toward Mathesson and fire and Mathesson’s body jerk to the left, tumbling across the edge of the bureau to the floor.
Then Reardon had fired. And for every day of the rest of his life he had recalled the thunderousness of his gun’s report, which had seemed to deafen everything, plunging the world into a heavy, mourning silence. Wilson’s chest had seemed to explode from below his skin, a bloom of crimson opening across his chest like the petals of a rose. He staggered backward, his face frozen in a look of childlike amazement, and it was the look on that face that had haunted Reardon forever afterward; he had never been able to describe it to anyone, not even to Millie, but he knew it would stay in his mind, like an unanswerable riddle, until the day he died.
It was the chill of the handle on his fingers that brought Reardon’s mind back now. He looked at the nameplate on the door. Patricia Lee McDonald. He released the handle and slid his hand deep into the pocket of his overcoat. Patricia Lee McDonald had been violated enough for one life, he thought, and the fallow deer too, and all the others. He turned and left the morgue.
12
On Saturday morning Mathesson telephoned Reardon to tell him he had not been able to dig anything up on Lee McDonald. Mathesson said that on Friday he had gone to the law firm where she had worked for the last five years, but that no one knew very much about her. She had no friends at the firm and did not seem to have confided anything about her private life to anyone.
“I talked to just about everybody in the office,” Mathesson said, “except for some high rollers off on a junket to Las Vegas.”
“And you got nothing at all?”
“Nothing.”
“All right,” Reardon said. “See you Monday.”
There was still another possibility and late in the weekend Reardon tried it.
On Sunday afternoon funeral services for Patricia Lee McDonald were held at Saint Jude’s Catholic Church in Brooklyn. Reardon went. He sat in the back of the church, his hat resting on his lap, his overcoat neatly folded beside him, and listened to the drone of the Mass, the old beseechments for the forgiveness of Lee McDonald’s sins and the salvation of her soul. At the front of the church he could see the coffin, closed, unadorned by flowers, resting before the altar. For a moment he imagined the body inside, chill, pallid, bloodless, the pathologist’s incisions sewed up with thick black thread.
Besides Reardon and the priest, there were only three other people in the church. Reardon remembered his father’s funeral. It had been a crowded affair, cops and their families squeezing together in the pews, and the people from the neighborhood decked out in their Sunday best. His mother had told him at the time it was the kind of funeral that happened only “when a good man dies.”
This funeral was different. When the services were over, Reardon made his way to the front of the church. An older couple he assumed to be Lee McDonald’s parents were getting into a car behind the hearse. A younger man stood silently beside a red Volkswagen, waiting for the hearse to leave for the cemetery.
Reardon stood on the church steps beside the priest until the funeral procession had pulled away. Then he took out his gold shield and wordlessly displayed it to the priest.
The priest looked at him. “I see,” he said quietly.
“I wonder if I might have a moment of your time, Father?”
“I have to be on my way to the cemetery shortly,” the priest said.
“I know,” Reardon said. “It won’t take long.”
“Go ahead then.” The priest put out his hand. “I’m Father Perry.” He was an old man, but the skin of his face was still tightly drawn across high cheekbones. He had once been a handsome man, Reardon surmised, which, in itself, must have been an almost irresistible occasion for sin. His hair was close-cropped and very white, which gave him the appearance of a retired military officer. He stood erect, but Reardon could detect a certain weakness in his legs, as if they were aging more rapidly than the body they supported.
“Did you know Miss McDonald very well?” Reardon asked. It felt incongruous, this litany of investigation on the steps of a church. On the sunny Brooklyn street cars went past. A boy walked past bouncing a rubber ball.
“I knew Patty all her life,” Father Perry said. “I baptized her.”
“You called her Patty?”
“Everyone did. I understand from her father that later on she started going by her other name. Lee.”
“Why was that?” Reardon asked.
Father Perry cleared his throat. He seemed to be trying to calculate what was proper for him to say and what to hold back. “Well, you see,” he said finally, “Patty had a lot of trouble in her life.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Family trouble,” Father Perry admitted gently. He looked about hesitantly, as if assuring himself that he and Reardon were not being overheard. “Mostly what I see is the sin of gossip,” he said. “You hear so much sometimes that you come to think the walls must be giving up their secrets.”
“What kind of trouble was she having with her parents?” Reardon asked.
“Well, she wanted to go one way. They wanted her to go another way. That sort of thing.”
“What way?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, they wanted her to be just like them. It’s very common.” He spoke gently, kindly, like a man who had seen a great deal of distress in his life, none of it very original.
Reardon adopted Father Perry’s language. “What way did they want her to go?”
“They wanted her to be a family person.” Father Perry smiled faintly. “Blooming with child every ten months, inviting them over for the Saint Patrick’s Day feast or Christmas dinner, living like they lived, wanting what they wanted.”
Reardon nodded. “And what way did she want for herself?”
“She wanted to get out of Brooklyn for one thing,” Father Perry said. He glanced dully at the long line of row houses on the opposite side of the street and the endless stretch of late-model cars parked in front of them. “She always hated Brooklyn. Even as a child. You should have seen the disgust in her face. I remember telling her once – almost as a joke, you understand – that it’s the sin of vanity to hate a place so much.”
“She thought she had better things to do?”
“Oh, yes, positively,” Father Perry said. “I think she had – what is it they call them these days?” – He smiled ironically, indulgently – “artistic drives.”
Reardon nodded.
“She paid a terrible price, Mr. Reardon,” Father Perry added.
“Yes, she did.”
“But she couldn’t have stayed here in Brooklyn. She’d have gone insane. She was like a tiger in a zoo, that one. And she thought Brooklyn was her cage, but she probably thought her family was the worst cage of all.” Father Perry looked out in the direction of Manhattan. “It reminds me of a story, you know. I can’t remember where I heard it. But it seems there was a woman who complained to her priest that in the place where she lived her father had been eaten by tigers, and her mother, and her husband and all her children. All of them, eaten by tigers. So naturally the priest asked the woman why she kept living in such a terrible place. And she said that at least in that place there was no oppression.” Father Perry smiled benignly. “For Patty anything was better than living with her family in Brooklyn.” He nodded toward Manhattan. “Even out there, among the tigers.”
“When did she leave Brooklyn?” Reardon asked.
“When she was twenty, I think.”
“Where did she go?”
“Where else? Manhattan. That’s the Lourdes of the artistically driven, I hear.”