It was even hotter upstairs than it had been in the muster room, perhaps because the window units here were older than the ones below.
Anna Hawley was a woman in her early twenties, Carella guessed, sitting in a chair alongside his desk in a blue cotton skirt and white blouse, her handbag resting near the In-Out basket. Across the room, Meyer and Kling, in shirtsleeves, were working the phones, contacting pawnshops again now that their burglar might have been a double murderer. The squad room seemed quieter than usual, too. Carella wondered where the hell everybody was.
"Miss Hawley?" he said.
The woman turned. Short blonde hair, green eyes, apprehensive look.
Lipstick a light shade of red. Foot jiggling as if she had to pee.
"Detective Carella," he said. "My partner, Detective Brown.”
Carella sat in his own chair behind the desk. Brown pulled one up. They both kept their jackets on, in deference to their visitor. At the windows, the air conditioners clanked noisily.
"I understand you wanted to see us about Mary Vincent," Carella said.
"Well, Kate Cochran, yes," she said.
Soft voice, slight quaver to it. The detectives waited. Her nervousness was apparent, but police stations often did that to people.
And yet, she was here voluntarily. Carella gave it a moment longer, and then he said, "Was there something you wanted to tell us about her murder?”
"Well, no, not her murder.”
"Then what, Miss Hawley?”
"I wanted to make sure Vincent didn't leave you with the wrong impression.”
"Are you talking about Vincent Cochran?" Carella asked.
The stand-up comic in Philadelphia, the brother who no longer cared to see his sister, dead or alive, thanks. "Mary Vincent's brother?”
"Yes," Anna said. "Well, Kate's brother.”
"What about him?”
"Well, I know you spoke to him a few days ago ..." The twenty-second, according to Carella's notebook.
"... and I'm afraid you might have got the wrong idea about him. You see, everybody was against it.”
“Against what?" Brown asked.
"Her becoming a nun. It wasn't just Vincent. All of us told her it was a stupid idea. All the family, all her friends.”
"And what are you, Miss Hawley? Family or friend?”
"I'm a friend.”
"Kate's friend? Or her brother's?”
“Vincent's my boyfriend," she said. "But you knew Kate as well, is that it?”
"Yes. We grew up together.”
"In Philadelphia?”
"Yes. She went to San Diego only after she joined the order. That was another thing. Her having to go all the way out to California. No one liked that very much, I can tell you.”
"Why would we get the wrong idea about Mr. Cochran?" Brown asked.
"What he said to you.”
"What'd he say?”
"About letting the church bury her.”
"He reported that to you, did he?”
"Yes. Well, he was worded you might think ... well you might think he didn't love her or something.”
“Did he ask you to come here?”
"No. Absolutely not. I come into the city regularly, anyway. I'm a freelance copy editor. I deliver work whenever I'm finished with it.”
"So when did Mr. Cochran tell you about our conversation with him?”
"Last Saturday night. At the club. He said you'd called that afternoon. Woke him up, in fact. Which was why he sounded so irritated.”
"When you say the club ...”
"Comedy Riot," Anna said.
"Is that where Mr. Cochran does standup?”
"Yes. But it was my idea to come here. I didn't want you to think he was still holding a grudge or anything.”
“What kind of grudge, Miss Hawley?”
“Well ... everything. You know." 'Everything?”
"All of it. From the beginning. From when Kate first told the family she wanted to be a nun. Her parents were still alive then, this was right after she graduated from college. I was there the afternoon she told them. Vincent and I were high school sweet hearts, you see. This was in January. More than six years ago.
I remember it was a very cold day. There was a fire blazing in the living room fireplace. We were all drinking coffee after dinner, sitting around the fireplace, when Kate dropped her bombshell ...”
"What the hell are you talking about?" her father shouts.
It is interesting that he has used the word "hell" when his daughter has just told them she wishes to become a nun in the Roman Catholic Church. To Ronald Cochran, who has been a renegade Catholic since the age of thirteen and who considers entering a convent the equivalent of joining a cult like the Hare Krishnas, the words his daughter has just hurled into the glowing warmth of the living room are tantamount to patricide. Ronald Cochran teaches political science at Temple University. His wife is a psychiatrist with a thriving practice. And now ... this? His daughter wants to become a goddamn nun? "You don't mean this," Vincent says.
He is four years his sister's junior, seventeen years old and a high school senior in that cold January more than six years ago. His sister has just told the family and his girlfriend Anna that she wishes to enter the Order of the Sisters of Christ's Mercy as soon as certain formalities have been consummated, the exact word she uses. She expects to begin her novitiate this coming summer, she tells them now. At the mother house in San Luis Elizario, she tells them. Just outside San Diego, she tells them.
"Who's been brainwashing you?" her mother asks. Dr. Moira Cochran is a Freudian analyst who remembers all too well that the master himself considered religion a "group-obsessional neurosis." That her daughter has now decided she "has a vocation," that her daughter now wishes to become "a bride of Christ" who will swear vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience once she has completed her postulancy and her novitiate ... "Is that what you learned at that goddamn school?" she asks.
That "goddamn school" is one of the most prestigious colleges in the United States, and Kate has been graduated from it with honors and a 3.8 index as a political science major and a psychology minor so much for the token gesture to the old folks at home. In the meantime, because she has a splendid voice and a true love of music, she has joined a choral group in her sophomore year, and then the church choir in her junior year. It is there that she initially meets a visiting nun named Sister Beatrice Camden of the Order of the Sisters of Christ's Mercy, who comes to instruct the choir in a complicated four-part hymn composed by Jacopone da Todi in the thirteenth century.
Kate is hardly a religious person. With a father like Ronald and a mother like Moira, she could never be considered even faintly religious. She is singing in the church choir because she loves to sing, but she is also fascinated by Sister Beatrice, who is the first person who ever suggests to her that her voice is perhaps God given. Well, bullshit, she thinks, and she admits this to her stunned parents and to her brother and his girlfriend ... "I mean, my voice is a result of genetic downloading, am I right? So what's this nonsense about it being God-given?" and yet the notion is somehow exciting, her voice being a gift from God and therefore something more than a mere human voice, something rather more exalted instead. When Sister Beatrice asks Kate to join her and some of the other sisters for dinner one night, she recognizes that a sort of recruiting process is beginning, but she's flattered by all the attention. And besides, she begins to realize she likes these people. There's an air of dedication about these young women that seems singularly lacking in the college girls all around Kate. The girls she knows are always talking about getting laid or getting married whereas these women in the Order of the Sisters of Christ's Mercy are talking about lives devoted to serving God by helping other people. They are talking about a vocation, a ministry, a charism. They are talking about meaningful lives, they ...