The Big Bad City (6 page)

“She didn’t mention anyone like that.”

“… or petty annoyance?”

“No one.”

“Any idea what she was doing in Grover Park yesterday?”

“No.”

“Did she mention she might be going to the park?”

“No.”

“Was it a usual thing for her to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Walk all the way crosstown to the park? Sit on a bench there?”

“I can’t imagine her doing that.”

“She didn’t say she went there to
pray
or anything, did she?” Brown asked. “Or meditate? Anything like that?”

“No, she prayed at home in the morning. For half an hour to forty-five minutes, before leaving for the hospital. And she went to mass once or twice a week.”

“Where would that be?”

“The church?”

“Yes.”

“Our Lady of Flowers. I’ll give you the address there as well, if you like. And the name of the parish priest.”

“Please,” Carella said.

Annette rose majestically and swept across the room just as if she were still wearing the habit. She opened the drawer on a long rectory table, and removed from it a leather-bound address book. Over her shoulder, as she began leafing through the book, she said, “Please find who did it, won’t you?”

It sounded almost like a prayer.

It was five minutes past three when they got back to the squadroom and called the mother house in San Luis Elizario. The woman to whom they spoke identified herself as Sister Frances Kelleher, assistant to the major superior. She was shocked and dismayed to learn of Mary Vincent’s death, and apologized for the absence of Sister Carmelita, who was in Rome at the moment.

“She’s expected back in three days, if you’d like to try again,” she said.

Carella marked the date on his calendar: August 25.

“Actually,” he said, “we’re trying to locate a next of kin we can notify. Would you have any information regarding her family?”

“I’m sure we do,” Sister Frances said. “Let me transfer you to the records office.”

The nun in the records office answered the phone
with a cheerful, “Louise Tracht, good morning,” and then immediately said, “Oops, it’s ten past noon already.”

“Good afternoon then,” Carella said, and identified himself, and gave her much the same information he’d given Sister Frances. Again, there was the shocked reaction, though Sister Louise admitted she hadn’t known Mary all that well. “Let me check her file,” she said, and was gone from the phone for perhaps two or three minutes. When she returned, she said, “Both her parents are dead, but I have an address and phone number for a brother in Philadelphia, if you’d like that.”

“Please,” Carella said.

Vincent Cochran was asleep when Carella reached him at three forty-five that Saturday afternoon. He told Carella at once that he was a stand-up comic and that he didn’t get to bed till sometimes seven, eight in the morning …

“So what’s this about?” he asked.

The man sounded annoyed and cranky. This was perhaps not the most opportune moment to tell him about his sister’s murder. Carella took a deep breath.

“Mr. Cochran,” he said, “I hate to be bringing you this kind of news, but …”

“Has something happened to Anna?” Cochran asked at once.

Carella didn’t know who Anna was.

“No, it’s your sister,” he said, and plunged ahead. “She was murdered last night in Grover Park here.” Silence on the other end of the line. “We were able to make positive identification only this morning.” The silence lengthened. “We got your name and phone
number from her mother house in San Diego. I’m sorry to bring you such news.”

Silence.

“Am I speaking to her brother, sir?”

“Once upon a time,” Cochran said.

“Sir?”

“When she was still Kate Cochran, yes. I was her brother before she became Sister Mary Vincent.”

“Sir?”

“Before she became a nun.”

There was another silence on the line.

“Mr. Cochran,” Carella said, “your sister’s remains are currently at the Buena Vista morgue here in Isola. If you’d like to make funeral arrangements …”

“Why would I?” Cochran said. “The last time I even
talked
to her was four years ago. Why would I want to see her now?”

“Well, sir …”

“Tell her beloved
church
to bury her,” he said. “Maybe that way she’ll get to heaven sooner.”

There was a click on the line.

Carella looked at the phone receiver.

“Is he coming up?” Brown asked.

“I don’t think so,” Carella said.

Carl Blaney had violet eyes, somewhat too exotic for a medical examiner, perhaps, but there they were nonetheless, neither blue nor gray but as violet as Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes were supposed to be. Rather sad eyes as well, as if they’d seen far too many internal organs in far too many degrees of trauma.

He greeted Carella in the mortuary at ten to five that Saturday afternoon and had the decency not to
mention that he was almost three hours late, their scheduled meeting having been for two. Carella instantly explained that he’d had to shlepp all the way up to Riverhead in ninety-degree heat on clogged roadways, and then had to make some phone calls when he finally got back to the squadroom, all of which impressed Blaney not a whit.

He told Carella that nobody here at the morgue was in any hurry, anyway, and besides he’d only just finished the autopsy on the woman who’d come into the morgue as an unidentified Jane Doe, had immediately been dubbed Jane Nun, and then Jane
None,
after a mortuary wag discovered she
still
hadn’t been identified—a situation now rectified, or so Carella informed him.

Even Blaney’s initial examination had revealed the extensive bruising characteristic of manual strangulation. The bluish-black fingertip bruises, oval in shape, somewhat pale and blurred. The crescent-shaped fingernail marks. But he had then raised the shoulders on a head block, eviscerated the body, and removed the brain, allowing the blood to drain from the base of the skull. When the blood flow from the chest also stopped, Blaney began his examination of the intact neck organs. He made his first incision just below the chin, allowing him clear and unobstructed scrutiny without the necessity of handling the organs before dissection.

“In manual strangulation,” he explained, “fractures of the larynx are common. I was searching for the horns because those are particularly weak parts of the thyroid cartilage and therefore …”

“The horns?”

“The ends of the hyoid bone. We’ll sometimes find fractures of calcified hyoid bone in old people who’ve suffered a fatal fall or some sort of accidental blow to the neck. But usually the bone and cartilage fractures we see are caused by strangulation. That’s not to say we don’t get
old
people who’ve been strangled. Or even strangled and raped. Your nun was how old?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Sure. Of course, fractures can happen during dissection, but then we don’t find focal bleeding. However slight, hemorrhaging of the tissues adjacent to a laryngeal fracture indicates it occurred while the victim was still alive. We found blood. She was strangled, Steve, no question.”

“Was she also raped?”

“Whenever a strangulation victim is female, we routinely check the genitalia. That entails a search for sperm in the vaginal vault, and acid phostase determinations on vaginal washings. She wasn’t raped, Steve.”

“I’ll tell Homicide.”

“Incidentally …”

Carella looked at him.

“Are you sure she’s a nun?”

“Why?” Carella asked. “What else did you find?”

“Breast implants,” Blaney said.

T
HEN SHE’S NOT A NUN
,” C
ARELLA’S MOTHER SAID.

“D
ON’T BE SO OLD-FASHIONED,” HIS
sister said.

“What’s old-fashioned got to do with it? A nun doesn’t get herself breast implants, Angela. That’s all there is to it.”

Carella expected her to cross her fingers and spit on them, the way she used to when he was a kid. The trouble with sign language, he thought, is that fingers can’t whisper. Last night after dinner, he had told Teddy all about Blaney’s discovery, little knowing that the twins—presumably playing Monopoly across the room, on the floor beneath the imitation Tiffany lamp—had been eavesdropping, each of them fascinated in a separate boy-girl way by the topic under discussion.

According to Blaney, before 1992 there had been three types of fillings for the implant: silicone gel, saline, or a combination of both, where saline was contained in one compartment of an elastomer shell and silicone gel in another. When it was discovered that the gel could bleed through the envelope and migrate to other parts of the body, potentially causing cancer, silicone gel implants were banned.

Sister Mary Vincent’s implants were saline.

This did not necessarily mean they’d been inserted
since
1992; saline implants had been on the market for more than a decade before the ban on silicone gel. But a good reason to suspect the implants had been recent
was the fact that the shell had not yet turned from clear to cloudy. Apparently, when the shell was in place for any amount of time, the body’s oxidizing compounds attacked it, causing discoloration. This had not yet happened in Mary’s instance. Given the fact that Mary was only twenty-seven, given the longevity of the silicone gel ban, given as well the fact that the envelope was still clear, Blaney was willing to guess that the implants could not have been more than three or four years old.

All of this the prepubescent twins had overheard and felt compelled to repeat to their grandmother the moment they were all assembled on her backyard lawn for the big outdoor barbecue. Judging from previous Sunday afternoon feasts at his mother’s house all throughout his childhood and beyond, he would not get home till eight tonight, by which time
Sixty Minutes
would have come and gone, oh well.

The indiscretion of the twins was compounded by the presence at the barbecue of Angela’s new boyfriend, an assistant district attorney named Henry Lowell, who had merely allowed the man who’d killed Carella’s father to walk out of a courtroom scot-free. He now had the balls to say, “That’s privileged information, isn’t it, Steve?” to which Carella replied, “Only if it’s revealed by
me
, Henry,” to which the asshole replied, “Who else was privy to it?” to which Carella replied, “Mark and April. They’re twelve.”

“Oh, let it go,” Angela said.

The men were standing at the barbecue, Carella turning steaks, Lowell placing chicken breasts on the grill for anyone who preferred white meat. Teddy was just coming out of the house, carrying a bowl of pasta that had been warming on the big stove in the kitchen. The screen door
slammed shut behind her, the sound signaling dappled sunlight, capturing her in stuttered gold. Depending on which degree of political correctness you wished to accept, Teddy Carella was either a deaf mute, a hearing-and-speech impaired woman, or an aurally and vocally challenged person. Or else she was simply Carella’s wife and the most beautiful woman in the world, dark-haired and dark-eyed, moving with elegance and grace as she carried the steaming bowl to the wooden picnic table and set it down. Carella watched her. He loved to watch her. She caught him. Threw a brazen hip at him. He smiled. On the table, his mother’s good red sauce immediately attracted bees. Teddy ripped plastic wrap from a roll, shooed the bees, covered the steaming bowl.

“Angela, the salad!” his mother called. “The bread!”

“Getting it now, Mom!”

Angela slammed into the house, followed by her three-year-old twins. Bang, bang, and bang again, the screen door went. Twins ran in the family. There were two sets here today, his sister’s and Carella’s own. Plus Angela’s seven-year-old, Tess.

“April! Mark! Dinner! Cindy! Mindy! Everybody! Henry! Come on! Tess! Dinner!” his mother called, though this wasn’t quite dinner at two in the afternoon, nor was it lunch, either, just your garden-variety, eat-till-you-bust Italian-style Sunday get-together.

He could remember hiding under the dining room table with his sister when they were kids. Now her estranged husband was a goddamn drug addict, and her boyfriend had let their father’s killer walk, my how the time does fly.

His mother would not let go of the breasts, so to speak.

Kept rattling on and on about it being impossible for the woman in the park to be a nun because nuns simply didn’t need or want breast implants. Sometimes she gave him a pain in the ass. Well, he guessed she was a little better nowadays, didn’t as often fall into those long moments of deep silence, when she retreated to whatever private space she continued to share with her dead husband. My father, too, don’t forget, Carella thought. My dead
father
. I mean, Mom, we
all
lost Pop, you know. But I don’t retreat, I dare not retreat, oh dear God I would burst into tears.

Today it wasn’t one of her deep meaningful silences. Instead, it was the nun and the Catholic Church, his mother seemingly having forgotten that she herself hadn’t been to church for, what was it, twenty years? And, listen, don’t even
mention
confession! On and on about the nun who had to be an impostor, while Henry Lowell sat across the table fretting over a detective’s family knowing the intimate details of a case the detective was investigating, well, gee, pardon me all to hell, Henry!

Carella would be forty years old in October.

Oh, yes, no more thirtysomething, forget it. He had read someplace that when Hollywood studios wanted to do a movie about a twelve-year-old, they hired a twelve-year-old to write the script. That was because a forty-year-old writer had never been twelve. Which meant that a seventy-year-old writer had never been forty, though a Hollywood studio would never hire a seventy-year-old to do anything but
star
in a movie opposite a thirty-four-year-old girl, the theory being that the gonads remembered what the heart and the head had long ago forgotten.

He sometimes watched old ladies plodding heavily
across city streets where buses threatened, and knew for certain that inside those shrunken bodies were the shining faces of fourteen-year-olds.