The Big Bad City (10 page)

Carella showed it to him. Harding read it carefully, word for word, and then handed it back, and stepped aside for the detectives to enter the apartment.

Someone had beat them to it.

The place was a shambles.

The refrigerator door was open, its contents swept out onto the kitchen floor. They could see into the bathroom, where the intruder had searched the medicine cabinet and the toilet tank, leaving the lid on the seat. The bed had been stripped. The closet door was open, Mary’s meager belongings strewn everywhere. The dresser drawers …

“Window’s open here,” Brown said.

The window was on the wall beside the dresser. It was locked the last time they were here. Now it was wide open. Several clay pots of blooming flowers were on the fire escape outside. One of the pots had been overturned in the intruder’s haste to leave.

“See anybody in the backyard late this afternoon?” Carella asked.

“Wasn’t
in
the backyard late this afternoon,” Harding said.

“Would’ve been sometime after three,” Brown said.

“Why then?”

“That’s when we left here.”

“Didn’t see anybody
anytime
cause I wasn’t in the backyard after I fixed that pulley.”

“You got a hair across your ass, mister?” Brown said.

“I don’t like cops shoving their weight around, that’s all,” Harding said.

“Maybe you’d like to come to the station house, answer some questions there,” Brown said heatedly. “Would you like to do that, sir?”

“You got no reason to detain me,” Harding said.

“Try obstructing the progress of a murder investi …”

“Let it go, Artie,” Carella said.

“Man’s beginning to annoy me! A woman’s been
killed
here, he’s acting like …”

“Let it go,” Carella said again. “Let’s see if we can find that letter.”

Harding stood just inside the door while they searched, his arms folded across his chest, a smug look on his face. Brown wanted to smack the bastard. In the night-table drawer, they found the various books they’d tried to remove from the apartment earlier …

“We’ll be taking these now,” Carella said.

Harding nodded.

… but they did not find the letter Mary Vincent had mentioned to Father Clemente.

Or any letter at all, for that matter.

Not in the night table or anywhere else.

“If you’re finished here,” Harding said, “I got work to do.”

Brown was thinking of all the fire-department and building-code violations he’d noticed on the arduous climb up to the sixth floor: the burnt-out lightbulb on the first-floor landing, the airshaft window painted shut on the third floor, the exposed electrical wiring on the fifth floor, the stacked cardboard cartons obstructing passage on the sixth floor.

He smiled like a Buddha.

If Mary Vincent’s appointment calendar was a true indicator of her social life, the nun had been fairly busy during the two weeks preceding her death. The calendar listed:

They had already talked to Father Frank Clemente at Our Lady of Flowers and Sister Annette Ryan at the Christ’s Mercy convent. A check of first names in Mary’s address book came up with the information that Felicia Locasta was a nun at Christ’s Mercy, Jenna DiSalvo and Rene Schneider were both registered nurses at St. Margaret’s, and Dr. Michael Paine was a physician at the hospital.

It was still relatively early on Monday night.

They hit the phones.

S
HE WAS UPSET ABOUT HER BUDGET
,” S
ISTER
F
ELICIA
L
OCASTA SAID
. “I
THINK THAT’S WHY SHE CAME TO SEE ME THAT
night. I was a math major in college before I joined the order. We often talked about money matters.”

The detectives were back in Riverhead again, at the Convent of the Sisters of Christ’s Mercy, at the crack of dawn, and they were sitting in a little room off the chapel, where there was a coffee machine, a refrigerator, and a sink.

“Please call me just Felicia, okay?” she said. “I mean, I know there are nuns who dig the sister bit, but they’re all a hundred years old.” Felicia was in her mid-thirties, a dark-eyed woman with curly black hair fastened at the back of her head with a simple ribbon. She was wearing jeans, loafers without socks, and a white T-shirt lettered with the words
SISTERS OF CHRIST’S MERCY
…

“… which Sister Carmelita might not find
appropriate
,” she said, hitting the word hard, “but she’s in San Diego, and I’m here. Anyway, I
am
a Sister of Christ’s Mercy and I only wear this around here before I go to work, what time is it, anyway?”

It was seven
A.M.
on August twenty-fifth, a blistering-hot Tuesday with the sun barely risen, an exaggeration, but, man, it was
hot!
Felicia had told them last night that she had to be at work by nine sharp, so if they wanted to talk to her they had to be at the convent by seven
latest
. Her work was teaching mathematics to the little deaf kids
at the school next door, so if they could be out of here by eight, she could shower and dress like a proper nun before she faced the day.

Carella wondered if he should mention that his wife was deaf.

Funny, but he never thought of her as deaf.

He let the moment pass.

“Mary always had trouble making ends meet,” Felicia said, “I don’t know why, I kept telling her to ask Sister Carmelita to move her up here to the convent. We pool our resources here and I know it’s a lot cheaper than living alone in the city. But she said she wanted to be near the hospital. ‘You never know what’s going to happen,’ she used to say. ‘One of my patients might need me.’ She was very conscientious, you know. I was with her one night when she’d lost a patient and she was virtually inconsolable.”

“Did she come up here often?”

“Or I’d take the train into the city. We were close friends. I mean, we’re all united in Christ, all the sisters in the order, but you naturally gravitate to some people more than you do others. We became friends shortly after she came here from San Diego. We met through Annette. Her spiritual advisor? Have you talked to Annette?”

“Yes, we have,” Carella said. “This would’ve been in February sometime, is that it? When you met Mary?”

“February, March, along about then.”

“How often did you see her?”

“We got together for dinner every three weeks or so. Usually she came here, sometimes we met in the city.”

“According to this,” Brown said, consulting Mary’s calendar, “she was here at the convent on the eleventh.
That would’ve been a Tuesday night. She has you listed for six-thirty.”

“Yes, that’s when we have supper here at the convent. Right after vespers. The evening prayer. You have to understand … this will sound terrible, I know, but, well, I’m sorry, but it’s the way it is. You see, we take vows of poverty, charity, and obedience. We
are
poor, we don’t simply
pretend
to be poor. So whenever Mary came here for supper … well … it was an extra mouth to feed, you see. We have a budget, too. So she chipped in for the meal. And we gratefully accepted whatever she could offer. Whatever her budget would allow.”

“How about when you went out to eat together?”

“Oh, we never went to anyplace fancy. You’d be surprised how many inexpensive little places there are in the city. We usually had pasta and a salad, a glass of wine. There are places that will let you sit and talk. We knew a
lot
of them,” she said, her eyes twinkling as if she were in possession of a state secret. “And in the spring and summer months, we’d walk. It was a gorgeous spring this year. There are a lot of very poor people in this city, you know. And not many of them had a choice in the matter. We
chose
this life. You must never forget that.”

“When you say she was upset about her budget …”

“Well, yes.”

“Was that why she came to see you?”

“Yes. I mean, we were good friends, she also wanted to spend some time with me and the other sisters. But the budget was on her mind, yes.”

“Did you talk about anything
but
her budget that night?” Brown asked.

“It was on her mind,” Felicia said. “That’s what we talked about mostly.”

“Just you and Mary? Or did the other sisters join in?”

“Just the two of us.”

“And you say she was upset.”

“Yes.”

“Only about the budget?”

“That’s all she told me about.”

“Did she mention receiving a letter from anyone?” Carella asked.

“No.”

“Did she mention some kind of decision she’d made a few weeks ago?”

“No.”

“You just talked about her budget.”

“Mostly. The difficulty she was having making ends meet. The trouble she was having with the vow.”

“Of poverty, do you mean?”

“Of poverty, yes. I’m not sure why it should suddenly have been such a burden. She’d been a nun for …”

“Did she owe anyone money?” Brown asked.

“No. Well, I’m sure she didn’t.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I’m sorry, but such a thing would never occur to me.”

“She didn’t drink, did she?”

“Not to excess, no. No. Of course not.”

“Hadn’t developed any bad habits, had she?”

“Is that a pun, Detective?”

“Huh? Oh. No. I’m talking about bad habits like gambling or dope, your everyday bad habits.”

The room went silent.

“She
was
a nun, you know,” Felicia said.

“We have to ask,” Brown said.

“Do you?”

She looked up at the wall clock. Brown figured he’d blown it. He waited for Carella to ask the next question. Carella was thinking he’d have a tough time pulling this one out of the fire. Felicia looked up at the wall clock again. He decided to bite the bullet, what the hell.

“How much was she living on?” he asked. “Would you know?”

“She got by.”

“But she complained.”

“Only to me. I was her closest friend. You can’t complain to God, gentlemen, but
you
can complain to friends. I told her she should have been used to it by now, what did she think poverty meant, champagne and caviar? I told her I could understand this if she’d just entered the order. But six
years?
Why did she take her final vows if she still had doubts? Why did she accept the gold ring of profession …?”

“Did she
say
she had doubts?”

“No, she simply said it was very difficult.”

“All at once.”

“I don’t know if it was all at once. Maybe she’d been thinking about it for some time. This was the first
I’d
heard of it.”

“But you said you often talked about money matters.”

“There is not a nun on earth who doesn’t talk about money matters.”

“Had she ever
complained
about money matters before?”

“Never.”

“Why now?” Carella asked.

“I don’t know why. A nun for six years,” Felicia said
shaking her head. “Entered the order straight from college. Brown University, I think. So all of a sudden she hasn’t got enough money to spend? Can
you
understand that? I certainly can’t.”

There had been mention of him last night on the eleven o’clock news, but he didn’t like them referring to him as The Cookie Boy, which made him sound like some kind of fat little Pillsbury Doughboy you poked your finger in his belly and he giggled. He was not only a grown man—twenty-seven years old—but he was also tall and slender and quite good-looking if he said so himself. A skilled burglar besides. A
professional
burglar, mind you, who’d been entering apartments unobtrusively since he was twenty-two when he’d been discharged from the armed forces of the United States of America, in which he’d served honorably and nobly, go ask Mom. Not a single arrest in five years, either, and never
hoped
to get busted, thank you very much.

The Cookie Boy.

Didn’t like that name at all.

Sort of diminished the whole point of what he was doing. Demeaned it somehow. This wasn’t some kind of dumb
gimmick
, this was a genuine attempt to transmute victims—he
hated
that word—into honest-to-God recipients. He was trying to create some sort of
exchange
here. No hard feelings, you understand? I know I’ve been in your apartment, I know I’ve taken with me some of your precious belongings, once very near and dear to you, but, alas, now gone. I want you to understand, however, that no malice was intended. This is what I do for a living, in much the same way that you’re a stockbroker or a nurse, a lawyer or a waitress. I
am a burglar, and I want you to respect what I do, just as I respect what you do, just as I’ve shown respect for all your possessions while inside your apartment. I haven’t thrown things all over the floor, I haven’t left any kind of mess here, have I? I’ve left the place just the way I found it, except for taking a few things with me. And in return, because I truly
don’t
want you harboring any feelings of resentment or anger, I leave you these chocolate chip cookies I baked myself. Not as payment for your goods, I don’t want you to misinterpret the gesture. This is not an act of commerce. Rather, I think of it as an exchange of gifts. I thank you for your belongings, and I humbly offer this gift of my own, these delicious chocolate chip cookies baked by yours truly, from my own recipe, and offered with all my love. Low fat, no less.