Sister Gregory was a wiry little woman with close-cropped steel-colored hair. She appeared in the ex-motel office in a greasy mechanic’s coverall, of a blue slightly paler than her eyes, which regarded them with a curious mixture of sweetness and suspicion from behind smudged, round spectacles. She explained that she had been fixing the boiler. Isabella who? She shook her head, as did the nun behind the reception desk.
They showed her their P.I. cards and explained who they were and what they wanted. The sister looked at these closely and returned them with a look that was kind but unsympathetic. Marlene remembered that look well from parochial school in relation to sloppily done French exercises.
“I’m sorry,” said the nun. “You know, anyone can get these made up.”
“Sister, do we look like Guatemalan assassins? Isabella is a friend of my daughter.” Faint smiles, regrets. A memory blossomed in Marlene’s mind. She rummaged in her bag and extracted the drawing Isabella had done for Lucy. The nuns studied it, conversed briefly in undertones, and returned it.
“Wait here,” said Sister Gregory.
They waited. They heard running steps. Sister Gregory burst into the office, flushed and angry.
“She’s gone!”
“What! When?” cried Marlene.
“She was at lunch,” said Sister Gregory. “It must have been sometime after that. Somebody broke in the bathroom window.”
Harry’s eyes met Marlene’s for an instant, and then he was gone, running out of the office and across the road. A passing semi blocked Marlene from following him, and by the time she got to cabin twelve at the Keystone, Harry was pounding on the door with the butt of his.38 revolver.
He used the pistol to smash the window, reached in, and released the lock and door chain. He turned his head and shouted to Marlene, “Get out of here! Call the cops!” Then he went in.
Marlene drew her.380 automatic and followed behind him. The bathroom door opened and Marlene had the impression of a huge shape filling the doorway, a big man, swarthy, with stiff black hair, wearing a white T-shirt and blue slacks. The blood was pounding in her ears. Something was shouted, but she couldn’t make it out. She shifted to her left to get a clear line on the big man.
Who moved, a great leap, like a forward going for the paint. Harry’s gun went off, twice. Marlene stopped, stunned by the sound.
The big man had Harry down on the floor. They were grappling for the gun. The back of the man’s white T-shirt had a large, round red circle in its middle, like a Japanese flag. Harry fired again. A window shattered. Again. A chunk flew out of the ceiling tile. In a corner of her frozen mind, Marlene knew that Harry was trying to expend all his bullets, because the man on top of him was stronger than he was and in a few more seconds would wrench the pistol away. Another shot.
“He’s got the gun, Marlene! Run!”
The big man struggled to one knee, and Marlene saw that indeed he had the pistol in his hand, holding it by its short barrel and cylinder. He turned to look at Marlene. His eyes were bulging; his face was pale and covered with sweat, and she could see a larger red stain on his chest, spreading around two dark holes in the cloth.
Marlene shot him in the face. His head jerked, but he didn’t fall. There was a hole in his cheek, below the left eye. Incredibly, he rose slowly to his feet. He swayed slightly and looked at the pistol in his hand, as if he barely understood what it was for. Marlene shot her remaining four bullets into his chest. The big man took a step backward; again he looked stupidly at the pistol in his hand, turned it around, and pointed it slowly in Marlene’s direction.
Then, like a man returning after a hard day’s labor, he took a step backward and sat down on the edge of the bed. He opened his mouth, loosing a gush of bright blood. He toppled sideways and slid off onto the floor.
“Are you okay?” asked Harry, getting up.
Marlene was on her hands and knees, retching into the tin wastebasket. She brought the spasms under control, got to her feet.
“Yeah, just great,” she said. “You?”
“My arm’s fucked up, but I’m okay. Jesus, the thing that wouldn’t die.” Marlene went into the bathroom. She rinsed out her mouth at the sink. Fortunately, the mirror had been shattered by a bullet, so that she didn’t have to look at herself. When she came out she made herself look at the corpse.
“Christ, Harry, who the hell is he?”
“Was he,” said Harry. He was going through the items on the bedside table: a.38 Chief’s Special in a woven belt holster, a wallet, a pair of sunglasses, a set of keys, and a black leather badge folder. Harry flipped open the badge folder, revealing an NYPD detective’s gold shield and ID.
“Paul Jackson,” he said. Half consciously, he slipped the shield into his pocket.
The name barely registered with Marlene. “My God! Where’s Isabella?”
They quickly searched the motel room. Nothing. Harry grabbed the keys from the nightstand and ran out to the car. He opened the trunk.
Harry tried to wave Marlene off, but she pushed forward and looked into the trunk. The marks around the girl’s throat were the same as those on the young men in the autopsy photographs.
Marlene screamed. She shouted curses, not the sexual and scatalogical obscenities of the Anglo-Saxons, but the dreadful blasphemies of Sicily, in Sicilian. God was a dog. God was a pig. The Madonna was a whore. Jesus was the son of a diseased whore. She pissed in Christ’s wounds. She cried, great heaving sobs, and smashed her hands again and again against the roof of the car. She tore at her hair. Harry grabbed her and held her still, while the sirens grew in volume.
Harry dealt with the local cops. Marlene sat in Harry’s car and shivered. Harry had given her his suit jacket to wear because she had started shivering. It was stained down the front with Jackson’s blood. She had her hands thrust deep into its side pockets. Her hands closed around something hard and angular, and she drew out the two keys with the red labels and looked at them dumbly.
Then her mind started to function again. A building at 800 some avenue and an apartment on the eighteenth floor. Yes. She had, in fact, been in that very apartment. In less than a minute she had figured the whole thing out.
NINETEEN
“Why am I not surprised?” said Karp. It was two in the morning, Monday morning. Marlene had returned from Pennsylvania an hour earlier, had stripped and plunged into a perfumed bath, ignoring Karp’s questions, and then had emerged and related the terrible events of the day, and what she and Harry Bello had made of it all.
“No, ‘surprised’ is not the word,” said Marlene. “Maybe ‘stupefied.’ Here’s a guy who has all the money in the world, he has a powerful position, he’s good-looking, personable. He could get all the sex, of any variety, that any man could possibly want. Why does he decide to rape the fourteen-year-old daughter of his maid?”
“Why not? He tried to rape the head of the Rape Bureau, didn’t he? And got away with it? And he probably would’ve gotten away with this one too if Jackson hadn’t been such a dumbass and Bloom had remembered to get his keys back.”
Marlene sighed and lay back on the pillows. At a certain level, she thought, evil becomes incomprehensible to the rational mind and exists only as agony, a bone cancer to the spirit. Tears were still leaking from her eyes at intervals, as much as she tried to push from her mind the thought of that thin white body curled into the filthy trunk of Jackson’s car. There had been no telltale marks on Isabella’s ankles. Jackson had hung her from the shower head; her own small weight had sufficed. Murdering the cabbies at the precinct, he had been forced into a horizontal technique, because the fixtures in the rotten ceilings (oh, yes, she remembered now, but she hadn’t made the connection at the time) wouldn’t have held the weight of even a skinny Central American. Jackson had probably intended to leave her dangling somewhere on the nuns’ property, another sad Latina suicide. Clearly not one to let a good idea go, Jackson, not that any of it mattered now. She would have to tell Lucy in the morning. And Hector.