"These came from Bell Atlantic this morning," he said. "Kate's bills for the past month?”
"So you told me on the phone," Cochran said.
He had the look and the sound of a sniveling spoiled brat. Brown felt like smacking him.
"Your sister called you three times in the past two weeks," he said.
"So?”
"You told us the last time you spoke to her was four years ago.”
"I didn't want to get mixed up in her murder.”
"Well, now you are," Brown said. "What'd you talk about?”
"The first time, we didn't talk about anything. I simply hung up.”
"Bad habit," Carella said.
"Is that a nun joke? Stand-up is my turf, Detective.”
"What'd you talk about the next time?" Carella asked.
"Money.”
Money again, Brown thought.
"What about money?" he asked.
"She said she wanted to borrow two thousand dollars.”
Blackmail, Carella thought. This has to be blackmail.
"Same story as four years ago," Cochran said. "She called me soon as she got out of the convent, said she was here in the East, could she please see me. I asked her was she finished with the fucking nuns, and she told me she was. So she came to Philly and first thing she did was ask me for a loan of four thousand dollars.
So she could get started, she said. Like a jackass, I gave it to her.
Six months later, she's back inside again, doing penance, I suppose.
Two weeks ago, she calls again. Not a word from her in four years, but here she is again. Hello, Vince, darling, may I please borrow two grand this time? Never mind she never paid back the four grand! This has got to be the ballsiest nun in the world, am I right?”
"She say why she needed the money?”
“I didn't ask. I hung up.”
“But she called back again.”
"Yeah. A few days later. Please, Vince, I desperately need the money, I'm in serious trouble, Vince, please, please, please." Cochran sighed heavily. "I told her no. I asked her why the hell she hadn't come to the funeral. Our parents got killed in a car crash, she can't find her way to Pennsylvania?”
“Maybe she didn't know, Mr. Cochran.”
"Then God should have sent down a messenger.”
“So you refused to give her the money.”
“I refused.”
"Did she say what kind of trouble she was in?”
“Are you trying to make me feel guilty?”
"No, sir, we're trying to find out who killed her.”
"Are you saying she got killed because I wouldn't give her the two thousand?”
"We don't know why she got killed, sir. You just told us she was in serious trouble. If we can learn what kind of trouble ...”
"She sounded ... I don't know. She kept going on about past and present, the past affecting the present, it all sounded like religious bullshit. She said she would pray for me, and I told her to pray that I get the four thousand back I loaned her four years ago. Then she said..." He shook his head. "She said, "I love you, Vince," and hung up.”
They allowed him the moment, both detectives standing by silently, feeling somewhat foolishly intrusive in what was essentially a private reflection.
"Did she mention having received a letter?" Carella asked.
"No.”
"Did she mention any recent decisions she'd made?”
"No. Just said she was in serious trouble and needed two thousand dollars.”
"Didn't say for what?”
"No." He shook his head again. "What kind of trouble could a nun be in, will you please tell me? The trouble was her being a nun in the first place, that was the goddamn trouble.”
There was another awkward silence.
"I used to tell a lot of nun jokes in my act," he said. "It was my way of getting back at her for having left. Every night, another nun joke.
There has to be a thousand nun jokes out there. Even when she left the convent, I kept doing nun jokes. It was as if I knew she'd go back in one day. I kept hoping she was really out for good, I kept hoping she'd come home again soon, but I guess I knew, I guess I knew she wasn't really finished with it. The day I heard she went back in again, I thought, What's the use? I stopped telling nun jokes that very night. I haven't told a nun joke since. Because, you see, my sister was the biggest nun joke of them all.”
That afternoon, everything broke at once.
First, the rain came.
It had not rained for almost two weeks now, and the storm that broke over the city at a quarter past three seemed determined to make up for lost time. Lightning crashed and thunder bellowed. Raindrops the size of melons or so some long-time residents claimed, came pouring down from the black sky overhead, drilling the dimmed afternoon, pelting the sidewalks, splashing and plashing and plopping and sloshing until the gutters and drains overflowed like the tub in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, poor Mickey overwhelmed. The rain was relentless. It made everyone happy to be indoors, even cops.
Particularly happy on" that rainy afternoon were Carella and Brown, who got back to the squad room to find a fax from a doctor named George Lowenthal, who said he had indeed performed a surgical procedure on a woman named Katherine Cochran, in the month of April, four years ago.
Equally happy were Meyer and Kling. The address and phone number Marilyn Monroe had given the pawnbroker were big surprise non-existent.
But now after also striking out on the six M. Monroes listed in the city's phone directories, none of whom were Marilyns they came up with the brilliant idea that perhaps the woman who'd visited Manny's pawnshop was either a Munro or a Munroe, the variant spellings of Monroe. In all five directories, there were three listings for M.
Munro, and four listings for M. Munroe. There was only one listing for an M. L. Munro, in Calm's Point, over the bridge.
Meyer called the telephone company, who supplied him with the full names of their initiated subscribers. Not surprisingly, four of the M's stood for Mary. Two of them were abbreviations of Margaret, and one of them was short for Michael odd in that men usually did not list themselves under an initial. There was not a Marilyn among them. But the M. L. Munro in Calm's Point was a woman named Mary Lynne.
"Son of a bitch!" Meyer said.
This was a city of bridges.
Isola was an island the very name meant "island" in Italian linked on one flank by bridges to the rest of the city, and on the other flank to the next state. Of all the bridges spanning the city's rivers, the Calm's Point Bridge was the most beautiful. People wrote songs about the Calm's Point Bridge. People wrote about the sheer joys to be found over the Calm's Point Bridge. The sky behind the bridge at four that afternoon was a golden wash, the city clean and new after the sudden storm. They drove with the windows rolled down, breathing in sweet draughts of fresh smelling air. The cables still dripped rainwater.
The River Dix glistened below in the late afternoon sun. There were sometimes days like this in the summertime city.
The telephone company had supplied an address for Mary Lynne Munro, but they did not call ahead because she had hocked stolen property and perhaps would not be overly delighted to see them. They didn't know what to expect behind the door to apartment 4C.
The Syrian signet ring had not been stolen from the Cooper apartment where The Cookie Boy or at least someone who'd dropped chocolate chip crumbs had possibly slain a forty-eight-year-old housewife and a sixteen-year-old delivery boy. But it had been taken from an apartment where the burglar had left behind, on a bedroom pillow, a small white box of chocolate chip cookies. So if the woman who'd hocked the ring knew the man who'd stolen the ring, and if the man who'd stolen the ring was, in fact, The Cookie Boy, and if The Cookie Boy was, in fact, the person who'd killed two people in yet another apartment he'd burglarized, then there was need for caution here. Admittedly a great many ifs, but as they approached the door, they drew their pistols nonetheless, prepared for the worst.