God Told Me To (11 page)

He wept.

An officer reached down to help him to his feet. At the touch of the officer’s hand, he started and the glazed look returned to his eyes.

“But they were His children too. I couldn’t refuse Him.”

Morton was led away.

Nicholas knew he would find nothing on the premises but he made a cursory search.

The officer who had pulled him off Morton said, “The guy’s crazy. They’ll put him in a home and he’ll be on the streets in five years. I’m surprised at you losing your temper, Lieutenant. You’ve seen these nuts before.”

TEN

The bar was within shouting distance of the old police headquarters building in Manhattan. It hadn’t changed much since the days when it had been a speakeasy. A jukebox and a fifty-star flag were about the only concessions to modernity, and the tunes on the box were twenty-year-old hits by Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Flecks of aged paint occasionally fell from the filthy tin ceiling, and a damp musty odor of disinfectant wafted from the floor.

Few civilians drank here. It was a place for off-duty cops and retired cops; men who rarely feel at ease when not near others of their profession. Here they could congregate, sometimes pass on a tip to another man, but mostly they just told and retold old embroidered stories. The drinks were cheap, a hard-boiled egg cost a quarter, and for a dollar they could get a large wedge of cheddar cheese with onions and mustard.

One of the more popular regulars was an ex-vice squad cop named Eddie Cook. He was a sallow-complected man whose hands shook with palsy. He hated the retirement that had been forced on him by health and age. Here he could still feel on the periphery of the job he had worked so long. With the help of whisky to oil his tobacco-scarred voice, he would tell of his experiences, relating various events as if he were a circus performer juggling balls of the past.

He had been chatting with Peter Nicholas for quite some time when he asked, “What’s the what, laddy? Never knew you to take the grape like I seen you these last days.”

Nicholas sighed, “Just a case, Eddie.”

“There’ll always be another case. Don’t let them get to you. Next thing you know you’ll be retired. Lonely and spending your time like me.”

“Never happen.”

“Don’t be so goddamn sure. Don’t. No, sir. Damn few of us get ourselves killed. Public thinks we got it made with our pensions. Fuck the public. We get retired and they don’t want to hear from us. Show me an ex-cop, laddy. You show me and I’ll show you a lonely sonofabitch who drinks too much, talks too much, and maybe, just maybe, keeps his hands in things by workin’ as a night watchman.”

“You working, Eddie?”

“Not these days. I was watching a construction site over in Jersey last week. Put me with a dog. Goddamn dog damn near bit my leg off. Wouldn’t give me a gun. No, sir. Just a silly-ass dog that kept going for me.”

Eddie shoved a cigarette into his mouth. His palsied hands had trouble with the matchbook but Nicholas knew better than to offend the old man by lighting his cigarette for him.

“They still got you teamed with Jordan? That hush-hush job you and him are workin’?”

Nicholas nodded.

“Can’t figure how he’s kept in the department. What he does on the street, Willie Sutton didn’t do to banks.”

“He’s smart, Eddie.”

“He’s a scumbag. I know guys who like him. Me, I’ll take a good old-fashioned hard-nosed sonofabitch like yourself. Like I was in my day. Do the job, do it good, and fuck the rest.”

“Jordan’s a better cop than I ever thought.”

“Oh, yeah? You’re supposed to be partners, right? So how come you got the scars? How come you’re the one sitting here going batty with the booze? By the way, you look like hell.”

Nicholas picked up his brandy and threw it down his throat. Brandy was served in shot glasses here instead of snifters or ponies. A small trickle of the amber fluid ran down his chin to the jawline. He wiped it away with his palm, and as he did so he felt the bristles of a two-day growth of beard. He called for another drink and bought a whisky for Eddie. Without meaning to, he suddenly blurted the words,
“God told me to.”

“Laddy, I figured you was just buyin’ me a drink for old times’ sake. Didn’t know God had a thing to do with it.”

“It’s never Jesus. God is what they say.”

“If God was a cop, the public would give Him half-pay after twenty years and throw Him out.”

Nicholas swallowed half of his fresh drink.

“Go easy on that grape. Or they’ll be snatching your gun and have you workin’ bow an’ arrow. Shuffling papers and goin’ to lectures on the evils of hootch.”

“This case I’m on. A sick, twisted thing. They all say to me,
God told me to.”

Eddie laughed. “Laddy, where you been? There’s always some nut saying that. I’ve even had broads claiming they got laid by the Almighty. Hell, the way some of them looked, it would’ve took a miracle just to get it up for them. I also had broads tell me they were being zapped by death rays from outer space. Stories, laddy, all imagination. When you look into them, you always find it plain didn’t happen. Else it was somebody like a stepfather or teacher, or some authority figure like a doctor or maybe a minister. Teachers are the worst. I bet high school English teachers have popped more cherries than a pitter in a fucking canning factory.”

“You ever run into one you couldn’t explain?”

“Not me. But my friend Callaghan, Kevin Callaghan, New Jersey State Police, he had one. Weird. Back in the winter of ’fifty-four. Found a naked broad on the highway. She said she’d started out from Cape Cod and ended there. Said that God did it to her.”

“That’s twenty-two years ago. It was never explained?”

“Nope. Remember it clear ’cause my eldest daughter was confirmed at just about the same time. Things about that case they plain couldn’t explain. So they did the next best thing—they forgot about it.”

“Your friend Callaghan still around?”

“Don’t know. He’s older than me, believe it or not, so he just might’ve passed on to the great after-hours joint in the sky. You could check it out with the Jersey State PBA. Say hello for me. If he’s still walkin’, he’d no doubt appreciate a bottle of gin.”

It was raining the morning Peter Nicholas went to the New York Public Library to dig up old newspaper files. A hard Manhattan cloudburst that beat against the pavements in thick, dark drops.

The steps to the main entrance of the library are guarded by two stone lions. Nicholas chuckled with a grim, ironic humor because he’d remembered the lions’ official names. Patience and Fortitude. Names, qualities, which Bernard Phillips had certainly forced upon Nicholas. The rain whipped against the lions and darkened their marble manes and gave them the appearance of gargoyles. While still attending Fordham, Nicholas often used the library for study. On clear days he would sit on the steps and eat his lunch and watch the pretty girls walk by. A city legend says the lions will roar when a virgin passes them. Nicholas chuckled again—he’d never heard them so much as purr.

His hair was soaked and dripping with rain, his raincoat wet through the shoulders by the time he’d climbed the steps and entered the building. The wetness began to chill him. He was shivering when he stepped out of the elevator on the third floor. He walked through the cavernous reading room to the section designated as 315-M, where old newspapers were kept on microfilm. The librarian fixed him with an odd expression as he told her what he wanted. She gave the impression she didn’t think a shivering, badly scarred man was to be trusted with public information. He impatiently flashed his shield and rudely told her to get it in gear.

Eddie Cook’s friend had picked up a woman in the winter of 1954. Bernard Phillips had been born in August of the following year. Subtracting nine months from the birth date had given Nicholas November 1954 as a starting date.

He sat in front of the screen and cranked the microfilm copies of all the daily newspapers for that month through the projector. There were more papers in 1954 than now. The
Journal American
, the
Daily Mirror
, the
Tribune.
His hair and clothing dried while he cranked the filmed pages, but he continued to shiver with chills and beads of perspiration dotted his forehead. He expected the information he wanted would be found in one of the tabloids. Instead, it turned up in the paper that prints,
“All the News That’s Fit to Print ,”
the
Times
.

On Saturday, November 13, 1954, the front page headline told of a run-in between Senators Joseph McCarthy and John C. Stennis. What was then called Indochina was in a state of transition as the French were moving out of that country. On page three, Pierre Mendes-France was reshuffling the French cabinet. On page twelve, next to a story about Jill the Giraffe of the Bronx Zoo, a small article grabbed his eye with the heading:
NEW JERSEY WOMAN CLAIMS RIDE IN FLYING SAUCER.

The woman’s name was Judith Phillips.

He took out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

He took out his notebook and made notes on the article.

It was night by the time Nicholas stopped his car in front of the residence of Eddie Cook’s old friend from the New Jersey State Police. The rain had continued through the evening, forcing him to drive the unfamiliar Jersey roads slower than he wanted. He leaped impatiently from the car, slamming the door. His impatience turned to anger when he saw no lights burning in the windows of the house.

The porch steps were loose beneath his feet as he climbed them. He slapped and rattled a screen door until a naked overhead light went on. Nearly five minutes passed before the inner door opened.

Kevin Callaghan looked like he maybe shaved once a week if could remember where he last dropped his razor. He wore a gray undershirt and dark pants that were bunched at the waist and ragged carpet slippers cut at the toes to accommodate swollen feet. He smelled bad. He carried a shotgun. He couldn’t stand up straight.

Nicholas was stunned. It wasn’t uncommon to see retired police officers who had hit the skids, but never had he seen one quite this bad. He wondered if he had come to the wrong address.

Callaghan’s voice was gruff and unpleasant. “You be Nicholas?”

Nicholas nodded.

The man waved his shotgun. “Can’t be too careful. This is a run-down area in a run-down town.”

“May I come in and talk over what I mentioned?”

Flecks of spittle rained from his mouth as he talked. “I don’t know. You call me over three hours ago. It’s late now. My hell, Carson’s on the TV already.”

Nicholas explained, “I had to drive over a hundred miles.”

“You weren’t clear to me. When you called I figured you was just down the road a piece.”

Nicholas had made it clear over the phone that he was a New York officer calling from the city. But he didn’t bother arguing with Callaghan. He merely switched the paper bag he carried from his left hand to his right.

Callaghan raised a grubby hand from his shotgun and scratched his whiskered face. He watched the paper bag like a fish eying a worm.

“That old case you mentioned. Never did make no sense.”

“Could we talk about it.”

“Memory gets fuzzy this time of night. Carson’s on the TV it’s so late.”

Nicholas shrugged and turned as if about to leave.

“Aw, now what the hell. Any friend of Eddie Cook . . .”

His lungs still filled with the rain-clear night air he’d been breathing on the porch, Nicholas was not prepared for the stench that hit his nostrils as he stepped inside the house. Stench and the muggy heat of a long-closed-in place.

Callaghan put his shotgun on a rack. There were three other rifles on the rack, but they all needed oiling and cleaning. Callaghan led Nicholas through a short hall to a living room. He snapped a wall switch that lit a ceiling lamp. Four bulbs were in the lamp but only one winked on. The room was a mess.

“You make yourself comfortable. I’ll see if I can find us something to drink.”

Nicholas handed him the bag. “Let me buy.”

Callaghan shuffled to some other place down the hall. Nicholas pushed a pair of pants off a chair and sat down. The air was so foul that he found it difficult to breathe. There was a fireplace thick with old ashes. On the mantel were a few pictures of Callaghan in his state police uniform and some mementoes from his time on the force. The mementoes had an abandoned and dusty look, indicating the man felt no pride in his accomplishments. Nicholas shook his head and knew that he would never be able to tell Eddie Cook the condition of his old friend.

“Here you go, fella. What’s your name again? Nickerson?”

“Nicholas.” The glass Nicholas took had once held jelly. Callaghan hadn’t bothered with ice cubes. “About the Phillips case.”

“Think I’ve heard of you, Nicholas. Didn’t you work on the Crystal murders ’bout eight, nine years ago?”

“No.”

“Damned if you don’t sound familiar. See, my memory is all screwy these days. The Phillips thing. My hell, over twenty years ago. Hard to remember.”

“Have a drink. Maybe it’ll come back to you.”

Callaghan foraged through a full ashtray and came up with about an inch and a half of cigar. He lit the butt, coughed, drank.

“Nick—what is your name again?”

“Nicholas.”

“Could’ve swore I know you from somewhere. Anyway, the Phillips thing. A crazy female.”

“Crazy? Or hysterical?”

“Any difference? You get a crazy female. Thinks she’s been raped. She’s going to be hysterical.”

It took an hour of steady prodding before Nicholas got the full story. Callaghan’s recollections floated in and out of focus. He mumbled. Twice he left the room to refill his glass, and the second time he brought the bottle back with him. Every few minutes he would lean over and slosh more gin into his jelly glass, but he never offered to refill Nicholas’s glass.

Nicholas’s head began to spin in the thick, overheated air.

“Tell you the God’s honest, Nickerson. I thought about not letting her in the car.”

“You were on duty, weren’t you.”