“Hello,” said the old priest, roused from sleep. “Hello, is anyone there?”
“It’s Kathy,” she said, in the presumption that he might recognize her name and voice out of all the students who had passed through the private school.
After a moment of silence, Father Brenner said, “Sister Ursula misses you. She tells me her shin still smarts on rainy days, and this reminds her to light a candle for you.”
“Why does she light the candle?”
“I believe the thrust of her prayers is that you’ll be better-behaved in the future… Kathy? Are you still there?”
But what do I light the candle for?
“Yes, I’m here.”
And who was Andrew praying for? The dead Aubry? There was no one in life he cared for. No parents. He’d been raised by a trust fund since birth. Who was he praying for? Or what?
“Kathy, may I tell Sister Ursula that her candles have had some good effect?”
“Tell me all the reasons for lighting the candles. What about guilt? Forgiveness for your sins?”
“No, that’s the province of the confessional. What sort of sin?”
“Suppose you’re a witness to murder and you never tell. Is that a mortal sin or a venial sin?”
“I’m so pleased that you remember all the buzzwords. Now, what murder did you witness, Kathy?”
“A woman. Let’s say it was my mother.”
“Oh, no, let’s not say it was Helen.”
“My mother before Helen. So what’s the payoff if I tell, and what’s the penalty if I don’t?”
“That neatly sums up your childhood philosophy of ‘What’s in it for me?’ Oh, and there was the companion tenet, ‘What’ll you do to me if I don’t?’ I believe those were your two guiding principles while you were with us.”
“So?”
“Well, the ultimate payoff is forgiveness-you won’t die with a stain on your soul. But before you can be forgiven, you must confess your sin, and there must be an Act of Contrition and a devout intention never to repeat your sin, a sincere desire to change your ways.”
“Did you ever light candles when you were a kid?‘’
“What? Well, yes. For my father. He died many years ago when I was a boy. But I still light the candles.”
“So he won’t get lost?”
“Yes, something like that. People do get lost in time, don’t they? Images and memories fade. But when I was very young, I think I lit the candles so I would not be lost…Kathy?… Kathy?”
She stared at the candle, transfixed by a memory of hell. And the old priest continued to call out to her across the wires of the worldly telephone company.
Andrew’s eyes scanned the clouds for the hide-and-seek stars which winked on and off, appearing within holes in the overcast sky and then gone again. The night was chilly and he gathered his blankets about him, but never took his eyes from the heavens.
It was like waiting up for Santa Claus, who never showed until all the children of the house were fast asleep in their beds. He feigned sleep, lying back and closing his eyes to slits.
He had no sooner done this than he heard the sharp thwack on the roof. When he opened his eyes, three votive candles rolled out of a brown paper bag which also contained another small loaf of bread. He turned his face in time to catch the fleeting glimpse of his savior’s head, a cap of moon-gold curls in flight just beyond the edge of the roof. Slowly, he crept to the retaining wall and looked over the side, afraid of what he might see.
No one there.
He knelt down to light his candles, and an hour later, he was still on his knees.
CHAPTER 6
“But the homicide rate has gone down.”
“Well, it’s an election year. The mayor won’t let us drag the East River,” said Riker, over the rim of his coffee cup. “Don’t worry about it, Charles. We’ll snag all the bodies next year and bring the stats back up.”
Riker was reading Charles’s magazine, which detailed the new and improved New York. “Hey, Mallory, listen to this. ‘Fashionable New Yorkers adore the subways.’ ”
“They didn’t print that,” said Mallory.
“The hell they didn’t.” Riker slapped the magazine down on the kitchen table beside her plate.
Mallory set down her coffee cup and picked up the magazine. She leafed through the pages, frowning. “Why do you read this stuff, Charles?” Her tone implied that she had caught him with a porno rag and not an upscale magazine for well-to-do New Yorkers.
“I rode the subway once,” said Charles, as though this were an accomplishment. “But now that I think about it, it was an abysmal experience. The train was supposed to be a local, and then it turned into an express and dropped me a mile out of my way.”
Mallory leaned toward Riker. “Did Markowitz really buy that fairy tale about Quinn showing up at the gallery late because he took the subway?”
“Not at first,” said Riker. “But Quinn’s private car was parked in his garage all night. The garage attendant verified that, while Markowitz kept Quinn busy. It’s not like he had time to bribe the kid. And the only taxi log was for the dancer. Now if Quinn was running late, he might have taken the subway. Maybe he’d worry about a cab getting bogged down in traffic. He wouldn’t want his niece to spend any time in that neighborhood alone. The subway would’ve been the fastest way to get there.”
“Yeah, right.”
“That’s why I took the subway,” said Charles. “It was urgent that I-”
“And Charles screwed up too,” said Riker.
Mallory scanned the article titled “Gilette’s Last Building.” The unveiling of the plaza was slated for the day after tomorrow according to an interview with Emma Sue Hollaran. She closed the magazine. “Riker, what do we know about Emma Sue Hollaran?”
“I never heard of her.”
“She’s the chairwoman of the Public Works Committee,” said Charles. “That’s the group that made Andrew Bliss a respectable shoplifter.”
“And she was an enemy of Gilette’s,” said Mallory. “I got that from Quinn.”
“Waste of time,” said Riker. “The old homicide wasn’t a woman’s crime.”
“I’m a woman.”
“Okay, we’ll put her on the list.” Riker pulled out his notebook and made a scribble of Hollaran’s initials to pacify Mallory.
“Actually, I was thinking Hollaran might make a good victim. I’ve got two dead critics now. Maybe it’s worth a stakeout.” She turned the magazine facedown and smiled at Riker. “Speaking of critics, you know that scar on Quinn’s face, just above the moustache? He told me Charles did that.”
Now Charles had Riker’s complete attention as a coffee cup hovered in midair.
“It was a fencing accident,” said Charles.
Riker’s cup settled to the saucer with a small crash, and Mallory’s eyes were bright as she leaned forward. “You scarred him with a sword?”
“Well, it’s a long story.”
The detectives looked at their watches. “Give us the short version,” said Mallory.
“It started with my acceptance to Harvard. I didn’t want to go.” No need to explain to them that he was only ten years old on the eve of his freshman year at college. “My mother asked Jamie Quinn to talk to me because he had just finished his junior year, and she thought he might be able to convince me that I would like Harvard.”
Young Jamie Quinn had immediately understood the problem of a child leaving the shelter of a school for the unreasonably gifted to matriculate among tall people of normal intelligence.
“He gave me a fencing lesson. He thought it might be a good sport for me. He said it would give me confidence.” And it might prepare him for the more subtle combat of navigating among the older students as a child with freakish intelligence which exceeded all known scores.