Blood Innocents

12

On Saturday morning Mathesson telephoned Reardon to tell him he had not been able to dig anything up on Lee McDonald. Mathesson said that on Friday he had gone to the law firm where she had worked for the last five years, but that no one knew very much about her. She had no friends at the firm and did not seem to have confided anything about her private life to anyone.

“I talked to just about everybody in the office,” Mathesson said, “except for some high rollers off on a junket to Las Vegas.”

“And you got nothing at all?”

“Nothing.”

“All right,” Reardon said. “See you Monday.”

There was still another possibility and late in the weekend Reardon tried it.

On Sunday afternoon funeral services for Patricia Lee McDonald were held at Saint Jude’s Catholic Church in Brooklyn. Reardon went. He sat in the back of the church, his hat resting on his lap, his overcoat neatly folded beside him, and listened to the drone of the Mass, the old beseechments for the forgiveness of Lee McDonald’s sins and the salvation of her soul. At the front of the church he could see the coffin, closed, unadorned by flowers, resting before the altar. For a moment he imagined the body inside, chill, pallid, bloodless, the pathologist’s incisions sewed up with thick black thread.

Besides Reardon and the priest, there were only three other people in the church. Reardon remembered his father’s funeral. It had been a crowded affair, cops and their families squeezing together in the pews, and the people from the neighborhood decked out in their Sunday best. His mother had told him at the time it was the kind of funeral that happened only “when a good man dies.”

This funeral was different. When the services were over, Reardon made his way to the front of the church. An older couple he assumed to be Lee McDonald’s parents were getting into a car behind the hearse. A younger man stood silently beside a red Volkswagen, waiting for the hearse to leave for the cemetery.

Reardon stood on the church steps beside the priest until the funeral procession had pulled away. Then he took out his gold shield and wordlessly displayed it to the priest.

The priest looked at him. “I see,” he said quietly.

“I wonder if I might have a moment of your time, Father?”

“I have to be on my way to the cemetery shortly,” the priest said.

“I know,” Reardon said. “It won’t take long.”

“Go ahead then.” The priest put out his hand. “I’m Father Perry.” He was an old man, but the skin of his face was still tightly drawn across high cheekbones. He had once been a handsome man, Reardon surmised, which, in itself, must have been an almost irresistible occasion for sin. His hair was close-cropped and very white, which gave him the appearance of a retired military officer. He stood erect, but Reardon could detect a certain weakness in his legs, as if they were aging more rapidly than the body they supported.

“Did you know Miss McDonald very well?” Reardon asked. It felt incongruous, this litany of investigation on the steps of a church. On the sunny Brooklyn street cars went past. A boy walked past bouncing a rubber ball.

“I knew Patty all her life,” Father Perry said. “I baptized her.”

“You called her Patty?”

“Everyone did. I understand from her father that later on she started going by her other name. Lee.”

“Why was that?” Reardon asked.

Father Perry cleared his throat. He seemed to be trying to calculate what was proper for him to say and what to hold back. “Well, you see,” he said finally, “Patty had a lot of trouble in her life.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Family trouble,” Father Perry admitted gently. He looked about hesitantly, as if assuring himself that he and Reardon were not being overheard. “Mostly what I see is the sin of gossip,” he said. “You hear so much sometimes that you come to think the walls must be giving up their secrets.”

“What kind of trouble was she having with her parents?” Reardon asked.

“Well, she wanted to go one way. They wanted her to go another way. That sort of thing.”

“What way?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, they wanted her to be just like them. It’s very common.” He spoke gently, kindly, like a man who had seen a great deal of distress in his life, none of it very original.

Reardon adopted Father Perry’s language. “What way did they want her to go?”

“They wanted her to be a family person.” Father Perry smiled faintly. “Blooming with child every ten months, inviting them over for the Saint Patrick’s Day feast or Christmas dinner, living like they lived, wanting what they wanted.”

Reardon nodded. “And what way did she want for herself?”

“She wanted to get out of Brooklyn for one thing,” Father Perry said. He glanced dully at the long line of row houses on the opposite side of the street and the endless stretch of late-model cars parked in front of them. “She always hated Brooklyn. Even as a child. You should have seen the disgust in her face. I remember telling her once – almost as a joke, you understand – that it’s the sin of vanity to hate a place so much.”

“She thought she had better things to do?”

“Oh, yes, positively,” Father Perry said. “I think she had – what is it they call them these days?” – He smiled ironically, indulgently – “artistic drives.”

Reardon nodded.

“She paid a terrible price, Mr. Reardon,” Father Perry added.

“Yes, she did.”

“But she couldn’t have stayed here in Brooklyn. She’d have gone insane. She was like a tiger in a zoo, that one. And she thought Brooklyn was her cage, but she probably thought her family was the worst cage of all.” Father Perry looked out in the direction of Manhattan. “It reminds me of a story, you know. I can’t remember where I heard it. But it seems there was a woman who complained to her priest that in the place where she lived her father had been eaten by tigers, and her mother, and her husband and all her children. All of them, eaten by tigers. So naturally the priest asked the woman why she kept living in such a terrible place. And she said that at least in that place there was no oppression.” Father Perry smiled benignly. “For Patty anything was better than living with her family in Brooklyn.” He nodded toward Manhattan. “Even out there, among the tigers.”

“When did she leave Brooklyn?” Reardon asked.

“When she was twenty, I think.”

“Where did she go?”

“Where else? Manhattan. That’s the Lourdes of the artistically driven, I hear.”

“And that upset her family? Her moving to Manhattan, I mean?”

“It more than upset them,” Father Perry said. “But I think there was more to it than that. I’m just an old priest, not God. I don’t know everything. But I think there was something else. Anyway, they disowned her. Told her she was dead as far as they were concerned.” He rubbed his eyes sleepily. “It’s been a long day,” he said.

“Yeah,” Reardon said.

Father Perry glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have to be on my way. They’ll be at the cemetery soon, and nobody appreciates having these things drawn out.”

“I understand,” Reardon said. “Thank you, Father.”

“Anyway,” Father Perry said, “there’s somebody else who could tell you more about Patty than I could. I just hear things from her parents, and they don’t know much, to tell you the truth. Patty pretty much wrote them off. However, you might try her husband, Jamie O’Rourke.”

“Her husband?”

“Used to be,” Father Perry said. “As far as the Church is concerned they’re still married. You didn’t know she was married, that she had a husband?”

“No,” Reardon said. “Where is he?”

“You just missed him. He was at the funeral. The only one here besides Patty’s parents. Tall young man. You must have seen him. He left for the cemetery in that little red car of his.”

“Yes, I know who you mean,” Reardon said. “Where does he live?”

“Not far from here,” Father Perry said. He gave Reardon the address and Reardon carefully wrote it down in his notebook.

“Thank you for your trouble, Father.”

“It’s like they say,” Father Perry replied, “trouble is my business.”

He turned away from Reardon and began to descend the worn stone steps. He moved unsteadily, tightly gripping the banister, slowly lowering himself from one step to another, like an old shepherd moving reluctantly, dutifully, toward his leaden-eyed and inconsolable flock.