Authors: Ed McBain
“Miss Hawley?” he said.
The woman turned. Short blonde hair, green eyes, apprehensive look. Lipstick a light shade of red. Foot jiggling as if she had to pee.
“Detective Carella,” he said. “My partner, Detective Brown.”
Carella sat in his own chair behind the desk. Brown pulled one up. They both kept their jackets on, in deference to their visitor. At the windows, the air conditioners clanked noisily.
“I understand you wanted to see us about Mary Vincent,” Carella said.
“Well, Kate Cochran, yes,” she said.
Soft voice, slight quaver to it. The detectives waited. Her nervousness was apparent, but police stations often did that to people. And yet, she was here voluntarily. Carella gave it a moment longer, and then he said, “Was there something you wanted to tell us about her murder?”
“Well, no, not her murder.”
“Then what, Miss Hawley?”
“I wanted to make sure Vincent didn’t leave you with the wrong impression.”
“Are you talking about Vincent Cochran?” Carella asked.
The stand-up comic in Philadelphia, the brother who no longer cared to see his sister, dead
or
alive, thanks.
“Mary Vincent’s brother?”
“Yes,” Anna said. “Well, Kate’s brother.”
“What about him?”
“Well, I know you spoke to him a few days ago …”
The twenty-second, according to Carella’s notebook.
“… and I’m afraid you might have got the wrong idea about him. You see,
everybody
was against it.”
“Against what?” Brown asked.
“Her becoming a nun. It wasn’t just Vincent.
All
of us told her it was a stupid idea. All the family, all her friends.”
“And what are you, Miss Hawley? Family or friend?”
“I’m a friend.”
“Kate’s friend? Or her brother’s?”
“Vincent’s my
boy
friend,” she said.
“But you knew Kate as well, is that it?”
“Yes. We grew up together.”
“In Philadelphia?”
“Yes. She went to San Diego only after she joined the order. That was another thing. Her having to go all the way out to California. No one liked that very much, I can tell you.”
“Why would we get the wrong idea about Mr. Cochran?” Brown asked.
“What he said to you.”
“What’d he say?”
“About letting the church bury her.”
“He reported that to you, did he?”
“Yes. Well, he was worried you might think … well … you might think he didn’t love her or something.”
“Did he ask you to come here?”
“No. Absolutely not. I come into the city regularly, anyway. I’m a freelance copy editor. I deliver work whenever I’m finished with it.”
“So when did Mr. Cochran tell you about our conversation with him?”
“Last Saturday night. At the club. He said you’d called that afternoon. Woke him up, in fact. Which was why he sounded so irritated.”
“When you say the club …”
“Comedy Riot,” Anna said.
“Is that where Mr. Cochran does stand-up?”
“Yes. But it was my idea to come here. I didn’t want you to think he was still holding a grudge or anything.”
“What kind of grudge, Miss Hawley?”
“Well … everything. You know.”
“Everything?”
“All of it. From the beginning. From when Kate first told the family she wanted to be a nun. Her parents were still alive then, this was right after she graduated from college. I was there the afternoon she told them. Vincent and I were high school sweethearts, you see. This was in January. More than six years ago. I remember it was a very cold day. There was a fire blazing in the living room fireplace. We were all drinking coffee after dinner, sitting around the fireplace, when Kate dropped her bombshell …”
“What the hell are you
talking
about?” her father shouts.
It is interesting that he has used the word “hell” when his daughter has just told them she wishes to become a nun in the Roman Catholic Church. To Ronald Cochran, who has been a renegade Catholic since the age of thirteen and who considers entering a convent the equivalent of joining a cult like the Hare Krishnas, the words his daughter has just hurled into
the glowing warmth of the living room are tantamount to patricide. Ronald Cochran teaches political science at Temple University. His wife is a psychiatrist with a thriving practice. And now …
this?
His daughter wants to become a goddamn
nun
?
“You don’t mean this,” Vincent says.
He is four years his sister’s junior, seventeen years old and a high school senior in that cold January more than six years ago. His sister has just told the family and his girlfriend Anna that she wishes to enter the Order of the Sisters of Christ’s Mercy as soon as certain formalities have been consummated, the exact word she uses. She expects to begin her novitiate this coming summer, she tells them now. At the mother house in San Luis Elizario, she tells them. Just outside San Diego, she tells them.
“Who’s been brainwashing you?” her mother asks.
Dr. Moira Cochran is a Freudian analyst who remembers all too well that the master himself considered religion a “group-obsessional neurosis.” That her daughter has now decided she “has a vocation,” that her daughter now wishes to become “a bride of Christ” who will swear vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience once she has completed her postulancy and her novitiate …
“Is that what you learned at that goddamn school?” she asks.
That “goddamn school” is one of the most prestigious colleges in the United States, and Kate has been graduated from it with honors and a 3.8 index as a political science major and a psychology minor—so much for the token gesture to the old folks at home. In the meantime, because she has a splendid voice and a
true love of music, she has joined a choral group in her sophomore year, and then the church choir in her junior year. It is there that she initially meets a visiting nun named Sister Beatrice Camden of the Order of the Sisters of Christ’s Mercy, who comes to instruct the choir in a complicated four-part hymn composed by Jacopone da Todi in the thirteenth century.
Kate is hardly a religious person. With a father like Ronald and a mother like Moira, she could never be considered even
faintly
religious. She is singing in the church choir because she loves to sing, but she is also fascinated by Sister Beatrice, who is the first person who ever suggests to her that her voice is perhaps God-given. Well, bullshit, she thinks, and she admits this to her stunned parents and to her brother and his girlfriend …
“I mean, my voice is a result of genetic downloading, am I right? So what’s this nonsense about it being God-given?”
… and yet the notion is somehow exciting, her voice being a gift from God and therefore something more than a mere
human
voice, something rather more exalted instead. When Sister Beatrice asks Kate to join her and some of the other sisters for dinner one night, she recognizes that a sort of recruiting process is beginning, but she’s flattered by all the attention. And besides, she begins to realize she
likes
these people. There’s an air of dedication about these young women that seems singularly lacking in the college girls all around Kate. The girls she knows are always talking about getting laid or getting married whereas these women in the Order of the Sisters of Christ’s Mercy are talking about lives devoted to serving God by
helping
other people. They are
talking about a vocation, a ministry, a charism. They are talking about meaningful lives, they …
“Meaningful, my
ass
!” Moira shouts in an outburst rare for a psychiatrist trained to listen patiently and never to comment. “You’ll be locking yourself away from the rest of the world! You’ll be …”
“It isn’t …”
“… marching backward into the twelfth century!”
“It isn’t like that anymore!”
Kate then goes on to explain, to four sets of ears growing increasingly more deaf, that she was given informational books about the order …
“Which the sisters call the OSCM, by the way …”
… as if it’s IBM or TWA, a refreshingly modern way of thinking about themselves that forever dispels for Kate any notions of nuns wearing hair shirts. For the past year now …
“Is
that
how long this has been going on?” Vincent yells.
… she’s spent time with the order’s Vocation Director, and she’s been visiting with the order’s Spiritual Director, taking psychological tests, addressing her finances, meeting as well with the Formation Director …
“A goddamn
cult
!” her father shouts.
… to set up a system for herself, finally creating an individual program best suited to her talents and her needs.
“I’m going to be a nurse,” she says. “It’s how I can best help people. It’s how I can best serve God. I know I’ll be sacrificing a home of my own, a family. I know I’ll be sacrificing comfort and independence. But as Christ’s bride …”
“I can’t believe this!” Vincent says.
… in union with Christ, she will also be sacrificing herself for the redemption of souls. Like Christ, she will live her life in poverty, simplicity, purity, and chastity. And she will forever offer, as only a spouse can, love and solace to His Sacred Heart.
She tells her parents, and her brother, and Anna Hawley that she’ll be leaving for the mother house as soon as certain documents have been signed …
“You’re signing away your life,” her mother says.
“This is totally stupid,” Vincent says.
“But it’s what I’m going to do,” Kate says.
“No, you’re
not
!” her father shouts.
“Yes, I am,” she says calmly. “It’s
my
life,” she says. “Not yours.”
To which, of course, there is no answer.
Anna Hawley paused.
“There was nothing anyone could do to stop her,” she said.
“So she left,” Carella said.
“Yes. She left At the end of May.”
Again, Anna hesitated.
“I suppose Vincent might have forgiven her sooner or later. But then, of course, her parents were killed.”
At his desk across the room, Meyer said into the telephone, “Just hang on to it, sir, we’ll be right there. Thanks a lot.”
“Killed?” Carella said.
“How?” Brown said.
“Bert, let’s go,” Meyer said.
“A car crash,” Anna said. “On the Fourth of July, last year. Kate’s father was driving. They’d been drinking too much.”
“Steve, we’re off. Piece of jewelry just surfaced.”
“Where’s the shop?” Kling asked, and followed him out of the squadroom.
“Vincent could never forgive her after that,” Anna said.
“Why’s that?”
“He blamed her for the accident. It was only after Kate became a nun that they began drinking heavily, you see.”
“That’s Vincent’s reasoning, huh?” Brown said.
“Yes, and he’s right,” Anna said. “If she’d stayed home, they’d still be alive.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It was her fault.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Which is why he wouldn’t come up here to claim the body, right?” Carella said.
“That doesn’t mean he killed her,” Anna said.
Brown was thinking some people should learn when to keep their big mouths shut.
“Sent you instead, right?” he said. “To tell us all this?”
“No, I had to be in the city, anyway.”
“You come in every Wednesday?”
“I come in whenever I’m done.”
“Done?”
“With the galleys.”
“When’s the last time you were in, Miss Hawley?”
“Last Friday,” she said.
I
T WAS VERY HOT HERE IN THIS SMALL SHOP CLUTTERED WITH THE FLOTSAM AND JETSAM OF COUNTLESS LIVES
foundering on bad times. Meyer and Kling were wearing lightweight sports jackets on this steamy Wednesday at one
P.M.
, but not because they wished to appear elegantly dressed. The jackets were there to hide the shoulder holster each was wearing, lest the populace of this fair city panicked in the streets. The owner of the shop was wearing a white short-sleeved sports shirt open at the throat. A jeweler’s loupe hung on a black silk cord around his neck.
He introduced himself as Manny Schwartz. The name on his license was Emanuel Schwartz. The license, in a black frame, was hanging on the wall behind him, together with an accordion, a saxophone, a trombone, several trumpets, a tambourine, and a ukulele. Meyer wondered if an entire orchestra had come in here to hock its instruments.
Schwartz took a ring from the case, and handed it across the counter. “This is what she brought in,” he said. “It’s Islamic. Ninth to eleventh century
A.D.
Origin is probably Greater Syria.”
The square signet was engraved with the drawing of a goat or possibly some other animal with long ears, it was hard to tell. This was surrounded by engraved petals or leaves, again it was difficult to tell exactly which. The tapering shank was engraved on both sides with a pair of snakes, or perhaps crocodiles, flanking a
long-tailed bird. A pair of engraved fish swam upward from the very bottom of the shank toward the signet. Meyer wished he knew what the talismanic markings meant. It was a sort of cheerful ring. It made him wonder why there was so much strife in the Middle East.
“What the caliphs did,” Schwartz said, “they brought in artisans trained in the Greek and Roman traditions, had them adapt their work to the needs of Arab patrons. This ring was probably commissioned by an upper-class member of society. It was an expensive ring, even back then. Today, it’s worth around twelve grand.”
“What’d you pay for it?”
“Three thousand. Little did I know it was stolen. Now I can shove it up my ass, right?”
He was referring to the odd legal distinction between a “bona fide purchaser for value” and “a person in knowing possession of stolen goods.” Schwartz had read the list of stolen goods the Eight-Seven had circulated, and he now knew that the Syrian ring was hot property. He could have ignored this, gone on to sell the ring at a profit, pretended he’d never seen the list. But if that ring ever got traced back to him, he was looking at a D-felony and a max of two-and-a-third to seven in the slammer. He’d called the police instead, who would now undoubtedly seize the ring as evidence. Some you win, some you lose.