“First tell me if you are okay. I know how you panic about her.”
The problem with still being friends with the man I used to be married to was that he wanted to know how I was, too.
“Like I said, it’s really only a minor burn. Here’s Dulcie.”
I handed my daughter the phone, and while she told her father the whole story, from the moment of impact with the soup, I tried to figure out why Cleo’s book was as much on my mind as anything else. A distraction? Something to dwell on other than the randomness of fate and the horror that I had to go on sending my daughter off to school every day not knowing when something else would happen to her?
“And then the doctor came and he looked at it,” Dulcie was saying, still only halfway through the story. She was making it dramatic, stringing it out and turning it into performance art for one-half of her best audience.
I was surprised that Cleo’s book had affected me as much as it had. I listened to people talking about sex all day, about their issues with their bodies and brains, and how they functioned or didn’t function. What was different about this woman and what she was saying?
As I watched my daughter, I realized my own arm throbbed. Ever since my child had been a baby, I’d experienced the same pain she did. I knew that it was psychosomatic and that if I worked on it, I most probably could stop it from happening. But I didn’t mind. She was my girl. I would have preferred to take all of her pain than to stop feeling it.
I motioned to Dulcie to wrap it up.
9
Saturday night Detective Noah Jordain had played piano till almost 12:00 a.m. in the same restaurant in Greenwich Village he had first found when he moved to New York City four years before.
He’d been homesick for New Orleans that night. And that led to him thinking about his father: a good cop whose name had been sullied and who’d died before he could clear it. Whoever had set up André Jordain, a thirty-year veteran of the New Orleans Police Department, might have thought he had gotten away with it, but Noah was still working on the case.
André and his partner, Pat Nagley, had busted a cocaine ring. It was cut-and-dried. Or so everyone thought. Until the defense attorney got the evidence thrown out of court by proving that André and Pat had been on the take, accepting payoffs from the dealer for five years until finally turning on the dealer when he refused to increase the payoffs.
There was a string of evidence presented that, on the surface, damned the two New Orleans detectives. But Noah knew, just as his mother and his brothers and sisters knew, it had all been fabricated. His father had upheld the law every day of his life. He’d been a devout Catholic and faithful husband. Yes, he drank too much sometimes, he could let his temper get the better of him, and he was a big flirt. But a bad cop? No way. The documents and evidence had to have been manufactured after the fact.
There was no question of collusion, and there was some connection between the drug dealer and someone higher up with more power than André Jordain. One day Noah would find out who’d been involved and clear his father’s name. He owed him that.
A year after the indictment, his father had died. A few months after that, Noah had broken up with his live-in girlfriend. His mother had three other sons and two daughters and six grandchildren around her. That left him free.
Noah had come to New York to get away from a police department that was as corrupt as often as it upheld the law, and so that he might see things more clearly from a distance. No, that was bullshit. At least he could be honest with himself. He had come to Manhattan to work the case from the New York angle, since there was evidence that the drug ring was tied to someone in the NYPD. And he’d also left home because he hated walking down the streets and smelling the river and doing all the things that made him remember.
The restaurant that had become his regular haunt was two blocks away from Noah’s apartment. Caroline’s had a long mahogany bar, a fireplace in the dining area and a beat-up old upright Steinway in the front that no one had touched since the previous owner had died twenty years before. After a few months of getting to know the current owner, having drinks or dinner there at least three times a week, occasionally bringing a date-never the same woman twice-Noah asked if he could play.
His soulful jazz was like New York. Moody and energetic, dark, then bright. He played the way they played in the twenties and it fit the restaurant. Caroline’s had had a musical history; it had been a popular jazz club and speakeasy during prohibition, catering to a crowd that sat and sipped their illegal gin, listening to music just like Noah’s.
Now he had a regular gig. Friday and Saturday nights. On Sundays he slept off the homesickness and the nightmares that followed the purging music. Usually he slept late. Till at least noon. His one sin of the week. Well, maybe not his one sin, but the one he felt the guiltiest about because he’d been brought up to be in church on Sunday mornings. Not in bed.
It had been four years since he’d walked into any house of God. The day of his father’s funeral. It wasn’t a loss of faith so much as a break of faith. A jagged cut that bled and bled and wouldn’t heal, and until it did, he’d rather sleep.
But that Sunday morning the phone call had woken him up at 9:00 a.m. It was the second Sunday in a row that he’d been woken this way.
“Were you sleeping?” Mark Perez asked.
“Umm.”
“Having a nightmare?”
“No.”
“Wrong answer,” his partner said.
“Oh, no,” Jordain said, anticipating the next sentence.
“Looks like we might have a serial killer, after all. You were right.”
“Damn, this is one time I wish to God I’d been wrong.”
“You have no idea.” Perez then gave Jordain the address of the hotel where the woman’s body had been found fifteen minutes earlier.
10
As he walked through the bedroom of the hotel suite, Noah took it all in: the unmade bed, sheets pulled back, pillows indented. Nothing violent. Nothing alarming about the scene. The rest of the room was relatively undisturbed. A bottle of mineral water was next to the bed. A glass was partially filled with clear liquid.
The television was set to an all-day news station, and a familiar reporter was talking about a suicide bomber in Israel who had blown himself up, along with seventeen others, in a supermarket. It happened so often, Noah realized, that you became inured to it, and you could walk by the TV and not stop to listen.
Not right, Noah thought, and for a few seconds, he did stop and then said a silent prayer for the people who had died at the hands of an overzealous lunatic.
And then he walked on, toward the world of another madman, the sound of the newscaster fading into the background.
Her back was to the bathroom door, and she was on her knees in front of a makeshift shrine. A plastic Jesus on a cross nestled in the niche of the soap dish. It was a crappy plastic religious artifact. Not like the heavy and sacred gold cross in the cathedral at home that the priest touched with reverence and that gleamed in the soft lights of the church.
This one glared.
Like the woman who had preceded her, she was wearing a nun’s habit. That much was obvious, even though it was pulled up and exposed her bare ass as she prayed at the tub, her head bowed.
Noah didn’t rush. She was past saving.
The perfect pale skin of her back was streaked with the dark red of dried blood. The marks were not random smears but crosses. Finger-painted crosses all over her back, her buttocks, the backs of her thighs and the soles of her poor feet.