He'd called Marilyn to tell her that O'Brien's girlfriend Maizie - who turned out to be as ditsy as her name would be coming along, and maybe the four of them could go out to dinner later, and Marilyn had said, sure, why not? So here they were with the sun just gone, listening to a real estate lady pitching renovated apartments to supposedly interested prospects like O'Brien who, Willis discovered for the first time tonight, planned to marry Maizie in the not-too-distant future, lots of luck, pal.
It was Maizie who looked like a hooker.
She wasn't. She worked as a clerk in the D.A.'s office.
But she was wearing a fuzzy pink sweater slashed in a V over recklessly endangered breasts, and a tight shiny black skirt that looked like a thin coating of crude oil, and high-heeled, ankle-strapped black patent leather pumps, a hooker altogether, except that she had a tiny little girl's voice and she kept talking about having gone to high school at Mother Mary Magdalene or some such in Calm's Point.
The real estate lady was telling Willis that the penthouse apartment, the one they were standing in this very moment, was going for only three-fifty negotiable, at a fixed eight'and-a-quarter percent mortgage with no points and no closing fees. Willis wondered if he should tell her that he was presently living in a town house uptown that had cost Marilyn seven hundred and fifty thousand-dollars. He wondered if there'd be any former hookers living in this fine renovated building.
In her high, piping voice, Maizie was telling someone that a nun named Sister Letitia used to hit her on her hands with a ruler.
O'Brien was looking as if he expected to get shot at any moment, Marilyn wondered out loud how such a reasonable mortgage rate could be offered in this day and age.
The real estate lady told her that the sponsor was a bank in Minnesota, which meant nothing at all to Willis. Then she said, "What do you do, Mrs. Willis?”
"It's Hollis," Marilyn said.
"I thought..." She turned to Willis. "Didn't you say your name was Willis?”
"Yes, but mine is Hollis," Marilyn said. "We're not married.”
"Oh.”
"The names are similar, though," Willis explained helpfully.
"And are you in police work, too, Miss. Hollis?”
"No, I'm a student," Marilyn said.
Which was the truth.
"My education was interrupted," she said.
And did not amplify.
"What are you studying?”
All smiles, all solicitous interest; these were potential customers.
"Well, eventually, I want to be a social worker," Marilyn said. "But right now, I'm just going for my bachelor' s.”
All true.
"I wanted to be a doctor," the real estate lady said, .and looked at Willis. "But I got married instead," she added, as if blaming him for her misfortune.
Willis smiled apologetically. Then ha trn, t, O'Brien and said, "Bob, if you plan on staying a while longer, maybe me and Marilyn'll just run along, okay?”
O'Brien seemed to be enjoying the warm white wine and cold canap6s.
"See you tomorrow," he said.
"Nice to meet you," Maizie said to Marilyn.
The church garden was crowded now with two ambulance attendants, three technicians from the Mobile Crime Unit, an assistant medical examiner, two detectives from Homicide, a woman from the Photo Unit, and a uniformed Deputy Inspector from Headquarters. The D.I. was here because the police department in this city was largely Irish-Catholic, and the victim was a priest.
Detective Stephen Louis Carella looked out at the assembled law enforcement officers, and tried to remember the last time he'd been inside a church.
His sister's wedding, wasn't it? He was inside a church now. But not to pray. Well, not even technically inside a church, although the rectory was connected to the church via a wood-paneled corridor that led into the sacristy and then the old stone building itself.
He looked through the open rectory doorway and out into the garden where roses bloomed in medieval splendor. Such a night. On the paved garden floor, the priest lay as if dressed in mourning, wearing the black of his trade, festooned now with multiple stab and slash wounds that outrioted the roses banked against the old stone walls. A small frown creased Carella's forehead. To end this way, he thought. As rubble. On such a night. He kept looking out into the garden where the crowd of suits and blues fussed and fluttered about the corpse.
Carella gave the impression even standing motionless with his hands in his pockets of a trained athlete, someone whose tall, slender body could respond gracefully and effortlessly to whatever demands were placed upon it. His appearance was a lie. Everybody forgot that middle age was really thirty something. Ask a man in his mid-to-late thirties if he was middle-aged, and he'd say Don't be ridiculous. But then take your ten-year-old son out back to the garage and try to play one-on-one basketball with him. There was a. look of pain on Carella's face now; perhaps because he had a splitting headache, or perhaps because he always reacted in something close to pain when he saw the stark results of brutal violence. The pain seemed to draw his dark, slanting eyes even further downward, giving them a squinched, exaggerated, Oriental look.
Turn a group photograph upside down, and you could always pick out Carella by the slanting eyes - the exact opposite of almost anyone else in the picture.
"Steve?”
He turned from the open doorway.
Cotton Hawes was leading the housekeeper back in.
Her name was Martha Hennessy, and she'd become ill not five minutes ago.
That is to say, she'd thrown up. Carella had asked one of the ambulance crew to take her outside, see what he could do for her. She was back now, the smell of her vomit still lingering in the rectory, battling for supremacy over the aroma of roses wafting in from outside. She seemed all right now. A bit pale, but Carella realized this was her natural coloration. Bright red hair, white skin, the kind of woman who would turn lobster red in the sun. Green eyes. County Roscommon all over her.
Fifty-five years old or thereabouts, wearing a simple blue dress and sensible low-heeled shoes.
She'd told them earlier that she'd found Father Michael in the garden as she'd come out to fetch him for dinner. That was at a little after seven tonight, fifteen minutes before she'd starting throwing up. It was now seven-forty; the police had been here for ten minutes.
"I sent one of the blues out for coffee," Hawes said. "Mrs. Hennessy said she might like some coffee.”
“Actually," she said, "I asked Mr. Hawes if I could make some coffee. We've got a perfectly good stove...”
"Yes, but...”
“Yes," Carella said, almost simultaneously, "but the technicians will be working in there.”
“That's what Mr. Hawes told me.
But I don't see why I can't make my own coffee. I don't see why we have to send out for coffee.”
Hawes looked at her.
He had explained to her, twice, that this entire place was a crime scene. That the killer might have been anywhere inside the church or the rectory before the murder. That the killer might even have been in the priest's small office, where one of the file cabinet drawers was open and papers presumably removed from that drawer were strewn all over the floor. Now the woman was questioning, for the third time, why she could not use the priest's kitchen. where, among other utensils, there were a great many knives. He knew he had adequately explained why she could not use the kitchen or anything in the kitchen. So how had he failed to communicate?
He stood in red-headed perplexity, a six-foot-two-inch, hundred-and-ninety-pound, solidly built man who dwarfed the Hennessy woman, searching for something to say that would clarify why they did not want her using the kitchen.