Falsely Accused

EIGHTEEN

“Cheer up, Butch, it can’t be that bad,” said Marlene soothingly. He was acting like a baby, and it was starting to get on her nerves. They were in their living room, waiting while a casserole warmed.

He groaned and began to tell her again how bad it was, but she interrupted him. “Look! Stop kvetching already! The main thing is, is Murray telling the truth?”

“Oh, crap, Marlene, how do I know? He says he didn’t say that flip stuff about speed, but you know Murray. He likes to shake up the civilians from time to time with tales from the crypt. It’s something he could have said. But that doesn’t matter. We need the transcript of that hearing to impeach England, and we don’t have it.”

Marlene thought for a minute or so. “You say the transcripts are in Monticello, in the county courthouse?”

“Yeah, why?”

“It’s only about three hours away. I could run up and get them.”

“No, Marlene,” Karp explained, “you’re not listening. They’re sealed records. It would take a court order to unseal them. It’s the weekend. I already called the courthouse; the guy there told me Monday’s the earliest they could start to look for them, and Monday’s too late.”

“Would Craig write you an order?”

“I guess so, but what good would it do? The place is closed.”

“Closed places can be opened,” said Marlene archly.

He looked at her, at the all-too-familiar expression on her face, and then slowly raised his hands to cover his ears. “I don’t want to hear this, Marlene.”

“No, you don’t, but you want the transcripts by Monday, and this is the only way to get them. Get the order to cover your ass with the judge and … I don’t know, I feel the need for some country air. Maybe I’ll take a drive upstate this weekend with Harry.”

“La-la-la-la-la-dum-di-dum,” sang Karp. He kept his hands over his ears, his body hunched as if to avoid blows, as he walked sideways out of the room.

He passed Lucy on the way out and got a startled look.

“Why is Daddy acting goony, Mommy?”

“Because he’s a goon. Come here, I want to talk to you.” Lucy sat by her side on the sofa.

“Look, Daddy’s having some bad problems with his big case, and I have to help him this weekend. I have to go out of town, so-”

Lucy’s face crumpled. “Nooooo!” she moaned. “You promised you would take Isabella and me and Hector to the zoo and to Rumplemeyer’s for sundaes. And go shopping. You promised!”

“I know I promised, but this is an emergency. I know! I bet Daddy will take you.”

“Nooo! It’s not the same. Isabella hates him.”

“Dear, there’s no reason for Isabella to hate him because he’s never done anything bad to her. Maybe it would be a good thing for her to start getting over her fear of men, hmm?”

“You promised!” wailed Lucy. Tears covered her tender cheeks.

“I’m not going to discuss it anymore,” said Marlene firmly. “You can call Isabella at the shelter and tell her your father will take you, or you can wait for next week.”

Lucy uttered a shriek of frustration and flounced out.

“What was that all about?” Karp inquired, wandering back in.

“Oh, nothing. Lucy’s being unreasonable again. I told her I couldn’t take her to the zoo because I had to go … someplace.”

“Oh. You know, I wrote down the information on the Dr. Bailey revocation hearing, the dates and all, on a piece of paper and I can’t remember where I left it. It might be on your desk.”

“Yes, it might,” said Marlene. “It’s probably filed under ‘Arrant Hypocrisy.’”

“Yes,” agreed Karp. “That, or ‘Keeping Daddy Out of Jail.’”

She was parked with Harry Bello in front of the Sullivan County Courthouse in Monticello, New York, a small two-story brick building. They sipped coffee and made plans. Marlene slipped a vitamin pill from her jacket pocket into her mouth and washed it down. It was early Saturday morning; they had left the City just past dawn, and her stomach was starting to grumble for real food.

“This does not look like Fort Knox,” said Marlene.

Harry grunted in acknowledgment and got out of the car, carrying a cheap plastic briefcase. He went up to the glass door of the building and knocked, long and hard. A middle-aged, hefty man in a gray uniform came to the door, shook his head, and tapped the sign that listed the courthouse hours. Harry reached into his pocket and pulled out an ID wallet. He flashed a shield at the man.

Police departments throughout the nation produce miniatures of their shields, and cops exchange these at conventions. Harry was flashing an NYPD detective’s shield, which, if you weren’t all that familiar with the full-size model, looked authoritative. It wasn’t precisely impersonating an officer. The guard opened the door; Marlene saw Harry speak to him for a moment, and then they both went in.

She went around the back of the building. There was an alarm, but she had to assume it was off. She was dressed neatly in slacks, a tweed jacket, low boots, and a white turtleneck with a Liberty print scarf, an outfit that tried for the appearance of old, weary money-at the opposite end of the social spectrum from lady burglars. She picked the lock to the back door and went in.

It took her a half hour to find the right room, and another to find the right filing cabinet. It took two minutes to pick the lock thereof, ten minutes to find the appropriate file, and fifteen minutes of flipping pages until she found the pages containing Selig’s testimony. She cranked up a copy machine and started making copies.

“What are you doing here?”

Marlene jumped and nearly dropped the file, but she completed the copy of the last page she needed and slipped the copies, folded, into her breast pocket.

“I said, what are you doing here? Who are you?” The guard moved closer. Marlene replaced the file, closed the drawer, and turned to face him.

“Sorry, national security,” she mumbled and started to move past him. He held up an arm.

“What?”

She pulled a red capsule from her pocket, held it in front of his face, and then tossed it into her mouth. “Cyanide,” she said. “I have to kill myself if captured. You’ve seen the lights in the sky? No? Other people have. This is big, Officer, we’re talking extraterrestrials, the Soviets. The Kennedy assassination? Just the beginning. Look at this!” She popped out her glass eye and waved it in front of his face. He blanched and backed off a step.

“High-technology device. Where does it come from? We don’t know. I got to go now, Officer, that or you got a corpse on your hands and a world of trouble from the Agency. I haven’t taken anything, I haven’t harmed anything. Just let me disappear and forget you ever saw me.”

He gaped. She pushed past him and in a minute was out of the building and into the car.

“Take off, Harry! I flim-flammed him, but I don’t know how long it’ll hold.”

Harry drove away. “Sorry. He went through the whole mug book.”

“He bought the story you were chasing a fugitive who used to live here?”

“Yeah. You get it?”

Marlene adjusted the rearview and replaced her eye.

“Got it.”

“You get it?” asked Karp.

“Got it. Murray was right, he’s clean.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. How surprised I’ll be when I find just the material I need on the floor of my office on Monday morning. Meanwhile, will you marry me and have my babies?”

A long clinch. When normal breathing resumed, Karp said, “Speaking of babies, Lucy’s in a bad mood. She tried to call that friend of hers at your shelter, and they told her she wasn’t there. Is that standard? Maybe she has to be on a call list, like jail.”

“I don’t know. Let me call them. I’ll talk to Mattie.”

But what Mattie Duran said, when Marlene got her on the line, was, “No, Lucy’s right. She’s not here. She disappeared sometime last night or early this morning. It took us awhile to catch on, because we figured she was in her box, but when we looked, she wasn’t there. I thought she might be with you until Lucy called.”

“She just walked out? How could that happen!”

“Hey, this is a shelter, not a jail. We’re set up to keep people out, not in.”

“And you have no idea where she went?”

Marlene could almost hear the shrug over the phone. “Not a clue. She came, we took care of her, to the extent that she let us, and she went. It’s not the first time it’s happened to us either, with street kids.”

“Yeah, but Isabella is not your regular street kid. Is Hector around?”

“Not lately. Look, it’s possible that they found a parent or relative-”

“Do you believe that, with what you know?” snapped Marlene.

“Not really, but Jesus, Marlene! What can you do? It’s the big city.”

“I’ll think of something,” said Marlene. “Keep in touch and call me if you hear anything, okay?”

Lucy was still stiff with her the next morning as they got ready for church. The child clearly blamed Marlene for her friend’s disappearance: if she had not broken her promise, they would have gone to the zoo and for sundaes, and the world would not have been turned upside down. And Marlene, of course, felt the same at some level, despite the illogic of it. She had given up trying to explain it all to Lucy. Time would doubtless heal her when Isabella returned, something Marlene intended to insure. In the meantime, Marlene was going to church with more than her usual burden of guilt, so much so that she chose to go early to Old St. Pat’s and stop by the confessional to have her tank drained. The nave was purple-draped for Lent, which suited her mood.

She parked Lucy with the good sisters in the church basement and waited at the confessional, while a heavy, dark woman in a lace head scarf and black dress and a skinny old man in a shiny suit used the booth, and then she went inside.

The slide snapped open, she said the ritual words and then began. Of the Seven Deadlies, Marlene specialized in wrath and pride. She was not envious of anyone; sloth had never been a concern-the opposite, in fact; she felt she had way more than enough worldly goods, avarice not a problem; she longed for booze and tobacco occasionally, but did not obsess about them, or food, which left gluttony out. Lust? Well, yes, on the impure-thought level, but she always worked her fantasies out in the sanctity of the marriage bed, in regard to which she considered that neither Father Raymond nor the Holy and Apostolic Church needed to know the squishy details. She was at present, of course, blameless in the use of contraception.

“I’ve had anger,” she continued. “I want to kill men, to keep them from hurting their families, from killing women. On four occasions I have committed acts of violence or caused them to be committed. I have stolen, three occasions. I have lied, under oath on two occasions, and on many other occasions. I have-” Here she stopped. What was the sin in respect to letting down Isabella and going to Monticello instead?

“I broke my word to a child in order to perform an illegal entry in order to help win a case for my husband, and now that child has run away and she may be in grave danger.”

This must have startled the usually phlegmatic priest, for he cleared his throat and asked, “Do you mean that your own child has been lost?”

“Oh, no, Father,” answered Marlene. “It’s a young girl, a refugee. Isabella … I don’t know her last name. She was staying at a shelter I’ve been working with, and my daughter grew attached to her. She vanished the other day, along with her brother, we think, and I’m worried sick about her.”

“I see. Continue, please.”

Marlene’s confession petered out into venialities. She received a hefty penance and left. Later, at the rail, she felt the pressure of a stare, and looked up to find that it was the priest looking at her with a strange intensity. This was more than odd. Marlene had never shown any interest in Father Raymond as a person, nor he in her. She did not participate at all in parish life. In this she was content, for although any number of heresies tempted her from the true path, donatism was not one of them. Unlike many of her contemporary coreligionists, Marlene was indifferent to the character of her priest, treating him purely as a spiritual utility. As far as she was aware, he returned the favor.

She was even more surprised when, after the service, he approached her outside the sacristy as she was about to pick up Lucy, and beckoned to her. He seemed nervous and distraught; curiously, these emotions seemed to give life to what Marlene had always considered an utterly unmemorable, middle-aged face.

“I wanted … my, this is difficult! I wanted to let you know that Isabella is safe and well. As is Hector.”

Astounded, Marlene blurted out, “Whaaat! How the f-I mean, Father, how do you know? Do you know the kids?”

“Yes. Hector I know quite well. In fact, he often stays here at the church. A very sad child. Much abused and, you know, not quite right in his mind. I’ve only seen his sister once. A beautiful child, and devout. The one time she was here-”

Marlene interrupted, “Please, Father, where are they now?”

The priest hesitated, clearing his throat several times, an irritating sound. “Well, I saw Hector just last evening. Isabella is … in good hands. She’s away from the City, in fact, which I think is a good thing.”

“She’s in danger, isn’t she?”

“Hector certainly thinks so. He calls them soldiers, but we believe they are agents from … the regime, in her original country.”

“Guatemala,” said Marlene.

The priest looked surprised. “She spoke to you?”

“No, but we figured it out. As far as I know, she only spoke at any length to one person, my daughter, Lucy. And her brother, of course.” She gave him a close look. “Is he here now?”

A significant pause. “I really couldn’t say,” answered the priest uncomfortably. “He often comes into the rectory in the evenings.”

Marlene changed the subject. “Do you know anything about their parents?”

“Not a thing. Hector is remarkably tight-lipped about it. Fear of authority, and no wonder! I haven’t notified the juvenile people about him for that reason. I think if I did he’d run completely, and live a … depraved life, on the streets. You know, the Church used to care for strays like him all the time, informally. Maybe there’s something to be said for it, the personal or spiritual approach, rather than everything being bureaucratic.”

Marlene gave him a smile so bright that he blinked. She couldn’t have agreed more.

In the car, Marlene asked Lucy, “What did you learn about today?”

“The forgiveness of God,” said the child shortly.

“And do you forgive me?”

“I guess,” said Lucy without enthusiasm. “I miss Isabella.”

“So do I. Father Raymond says he knows where she is and that she’s safe.”

Lucy’s face lit with interest. “Where is she?”

“He wouldn’t say. I think he promised that he wouldn’t.”

“Are you going to find her? Please, Mommy!”

“You know, I think I will. I think that if she’s being chased by the kind of people I think she’s being chased by, they’re not going to be slowed down much by a bunch of nuns. And I’d like to see if she has any relations in town. It would help a lot if I knew her last name. You don’t happen to know, do you, Luce?”

“No,” said Lucy. Aha! thought her mom.

Later, having served a mighty breakfast of French toast, and his lordship having gone out to shoot hoops in the Village, Marlene was washing up and handing the dishes to her daughter for drying when she remarked, “You know, I was thinking: it’s pretty easy to decide between doing bad and doing good, but it’s a lot harder to decide between two kinds of good. Like, I broke my promise to you, but I really helped Daddy, and like, it’s wrong to tell a lie, but sometimes we tell lies to avoid hurting people’s feelings.”

“White lies,” said Lucy.

“Yes. Look, put down that plate and look at me. You’re seven, which is supposed to be the age you become capable of making moral choices. Let me ask you to make a moral choice. I think Isabella told you her full name, and you promised not to tell anyone else. I think that some very bad men from her old country are chasing her, and that’s why she ran away. Now, I think that if I had her full name, I could find some relative who might know what the danger was, or where Isabella was, so I could help protect her. Now, maybe nothing will happen. But maybe you keeping your promise prevents me from finding her before the bad guys do. You have to choose, and you have to bear the moral responsibility for whatever happens.”

“But she’ll hate me if I tell.”

“Yes, she might. In which case you have to decide whether you want Isabella safe and hating you, or loving you and hurt or dead.”

Marlene’s heart broke as she watched her daughter’s eyes fill with tears, but she held her tongue and resisted the urge to sweep the child into her arms and roll back the implacable years. Suddenly, Lucy sniffed loudly and turned away and ran clattering out of the kitchen. She was back in a moment holding out at full arm’s length a piece of folded notebook paper. Marlene took it and spread it out.

Around the outside of the page was a garland of lush flowers, heavily outlined, executed in colored pencil. Birds in yellow and green, beautifully rendered in the same bold style, were set among the blossoms. In the center was written, in a smooth, antique, schoolroom hand: Lucy, Yo Te Amo, Su Amiga, Isabella Conception Chajul y Machado.

Marlene swallowed a lump and said, “Good call, Luce. Now, do you happen to know her mommy’s first name?”

“Corazon,” said the child, and then collapsed, wailing, in her mother’s arms.

“That sounds like a Maya name, that Chajul,” said Ariadne Stupenagel over the phone. “You say they’re Guatemalans?”

“We think so,” said Marlene. She had called Stupenagel for help with finding out where a Church-connected underground would stash a kid from Guatemala. Stupenagel was one of two people she could think of to call, and the other one, Mattie Duran, was unlikely to have any Church contacts.

“Where from in Guatemala?”

“We don’t know that either. Lucy was babbling something about San Francisco, but apparently there are dozens of-”

“Could it have been San Francisco Nenton?” Stupenagel asked carefully.

“Possibly. Why?”

“Jesus!” A shriek.

Marlene had to take the phone from her ear. “What?”

“Marlene, in November of the year before last, a special unit of the Guatemalan Army, trained by the U.S. government, entered the village of San Francisco Nenton and massacred the entire population, 434 men, women, and children. Or so we thought. God, I’ve got the trembles, Champ! If this fucking kid is an eyewitness to the Nenton massacre … my God, the junta would go crazy if they knew she was wandering around in the States. And you say she’s got a brother to confirm it? Christ, Marlene, you got to find her. And let me have first crack at her, of course.”

“Of course,” lied Marlene. “But look, what about my original question?”

“Oh, who they’d shunt her to for cover? God, I couldn’t begin to figure …”

“What about those nuns you mentioned that time-the Sisters of Perpetual Dysentery? Are they in the States?”

“Damn! You’re right, I must be getting senile. I’ve been so focused on this cab driver thing. They’re the Sisters of Perpetual Help.”

“I never heard of them,” said Marlene.

“No, they’re small, and they only turn up where nobody else’ll go. A daughter house of the Poor Clares, I think. They’re all R.N.’s or nurse practitioners, plus they’re all cross-trained in mucky stuff-agronomy, sanitation. They jump out of airplanes too. A far cry from the penguins. They have a rest house someplace in Jersey. Just a sec, I’ll get it for you.” Clunk and rustlings. “Yo. It’s in Chester, Pee Ay.” She read off the address. “By the way, speaking of the cabbies …”

Marlene brought her up to date, closing with her visit to the Twenty-fifth Precinct and her conversation with Clancy. Marlene heard the scratch of note taking. “Oh, also,” she added, “you’ll be interested to know I saw Jimmy Dalton up there schmoozing with a couple of dicks, waving his stinky-” “What?”

“Jimmy Dalton at the Two-Five. I thought-” “Thanks, Champ-look, keep in touch, this is great, gotta go.” She left Marlene staring puzzled at the dead phone. She pushed down the button and called Harry Bello.

Hector Roberto Chajul y Machado, aged twelve, slipped from the basement room in the rectory of Old St. Patrick’s, where he had passed the night, and walked north on Mulberry Street until he came to Houston, where he turned east. He paused at the corner and, as he did habitually, turned to see if someone was following him. He saw no one and went on his way. He saw no one because the man who was following was very good.

The boy entered the Lexington Avenue IRT subway station on Houston. In the dank underground, he checked to see that he was unobserved and then darted under the turnstile. He took the Lex up to 116th Street, left the subway, and walked to a tenement at 117th Street. At the third-floor front apartment, he listened carefully at the door, as he had been taught. There were no sounds. He drew out a key that hung around his neck by a long, dirty string, opened the lock, and went in.

From his perch on the stairwell, one floor above, Harry Bello heard the boy cry out. In an instant he was down the stairs and through the door. Like most tenement apartments, it had a railroad layout, living room, kitchen, and a narrow hall leading to two bedrooms and a bath. The place had been tossed, and crudely too. The couch in the living room had been overturned and slashed, the small television knocked off its table and tossed into a corner. Harry moved into the kitchen.

Hector was in the center of the room, surrounded by ruin. The refrigerator and the pantry had been emptied, the food containers broken and spilled onto the floor, which was covered with a swill of liquids, rice, corn flakes, dried beans, and broken crockery. The counter drawers hung open, their contents scooped out and strewn in piles beneath them.

The boy cried out when he saw Harry and grabbed a long knife from a pile. He charged but slipped on the mess and fell to his knees. Harry stepped on the knife, knelt, and hugged the boy to him.

“Listen! I’m not here to hurt you. I didn’t do this. I’m Lucy’s godfather. Soy el padrino de Lucy. Comprende? Lucy!”

Hector stopped struggling. They both stood up. Harry asked, “Do you know where your mother is?”

He nodded. “She’s working.”

“You got a number?” Nod.

“Okay, let’s call her.”

“The lady say not to call.”

“Yeah, well, this is an emergency. Give me the number.”

Harry called and got an irate woman who told him that Corazon had not shown up for work that morning, and that she was highly inconvenienced, and that as far as she was concerned-

Harry hung up. “Hector,” he said, “I’m going to look around here for a minute, and then you and me are going to go up to Lucy’s house and you’re going to stay there for a while. And then we need to go get your sister and bring her back to the City. I think you all need to stay at Lucy’s until we figure out who did this and who’s after you.”

“The soldiers,” said Hector.

“Yeah, them.” Harry started to go through the trash from the kitchen drawers. People whose equipage does not run to desks and filing cabinets use kitchen drawers as a depository of sorts. Harry found a bank book, electric and phone bills, but no pay stubs and no personal papers. He also found two keys on a ring, which caught his eye, because they had red embossed-tape labels on them. The labels read “800 18 Fr” and “800 18 B.” He thought for a while and then made a phone call, and asked a cop he knew to use the reverse-number directory on the phone number he had just called. The cop gave him an answer. He grunted thanks, and when he left the apartment with Hector the keys were in his pocket.

Shortly after passing the Joyce Kilmer service plaza on the New Jersey Turnpike, Harry thought of the keys. He reached them out of his pocket and tossed them to Marlene, who was in the passenger seat of the tan Plymouth.

“Funny.”

Marlene looked at them, as always trying to stay in step with Harry’s jumps. “Work keys,” she reasoned out loud. “Somebody’s apartment; she’s a maid. But not her current employer?” Harry nodded. “So: another employer, or a former employer, to whom she didn’t give back the keys, because … she ran? She was canned under unpleasant circumstances?”

Harry shrugged. “Front and back. And no letter.”

Marlene inspected the key labels. She had a peculiar feeling, almost a déja vu, something tugging at her mind. “Front and back doors means either a private residence, something in the burbs, or an apartment in an old-fashioned, high-tone building. The 800/18? Eight hundred Eighteenth Street? No such place in Manhattan. Or the eighteenth floor of 800 some avenue? Oh, I see, you think the floor having no letters after it means there’s only one apartment on the floor, so, somebody with money.” She laughed and handed the keys back. “Or maybe she just picked them up on the street.” But she didn’t believe that.

The Sisters of Perpetual Help were housed in what used to be a cheap motel, one of several along a strip of mixed zoning cut off from the rest of Chester, Pennsylvania, by the roaring mass of the 1-95 freeway. The motel signs had been removed, and a black and white sign with the name of the order had been placed in the window of the former motel office. Here Marlene and Harry entered.

A rugged-faced young woman with short brown hair, wearing a modest blouse and jumper combination, looked up and smiled and asked if she could be of help. Marlene explained who they were and asked if they could see Isabella Machado. The young woman looked blank, and said that she had no information about a guest with that name, but if they cared to wait, she would refer them to Sister Gregory, who was out at the moment. If they wanted to get something to eat while they waited, the restaurant in the motel across the road was open. You understand, things are always a little slow on Sundays. They understood, but short of rousting the place with drawn guns, they could do nothing, and so they said they’d be back and traipsed across the street to the Keystone Motel, 24-Hour Service, Truckers Welcome, an arc of aqua-colored huts terminating in a diner-like office and restaurant.

Several truckers had, in fact, been welcomed at the Keystone, as witnessed by their rigs parked in a row on the motel’s large gravel lot. There were also private cars in slots in front of three of the huts.

They went in and sat at the counter. Marlene was not hungry; she ordered a bran muffin and coffee. Harry ordered a cheese steak, the specialty of the house.

“What are you staring at, Harry?”

“The Fury with the New York plates in the lot there.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

Harry bit into his sandwich and chewed for a while. Then he said, “It looks like an unmarked.”

Marlene frowned. “Harry, that doesn’t make any sense. Why would an NYPD car be parked in a motel lot in Chester?”

Harry shrugged. He didn’t seem interested in his sandwich anymore. He stared at the black Fury some more and then abruptly rose, slapped some bills on the table, and walked out. Marlene ran after him.

“It is an unmarked,” said Harry, shading his eyes with his face pushed up against the glass of the Fury’s window. He stared at the door of the cabin number twelve, the one closest to the car, as if trying to see through it.

“Come on, Harry,” said Marlene. “It could be a fugitive bust, a police convention, anything … come on, I want to see Isabella.”

He gave her a scornful look and stalked away. Marlene looked at the car and then at Harry’s retreating back. She tried, and failed, to see what an NYPD car had to do with Guatemalan hit squads while she trotted to catch up with Harry. He had an idea, and since he was Harry Bello, it was probably a good one, but she had no clue as to what it was.

Sister Gregory was a wiry little woman with close-cropped steel-colored hair. She appeared in the ex-motel office in a greasy mechanic’s coverall, of a blue slightly paler than her eyes, which regarded them with a curious mixture of sweetness and suspicion from behind smudged, round spectacles. She explained that she had been fixing the boiler. Isabella who? She shook her head, as did the nun behind the reception desk.

They showed her their P.I. cards and explained who they were and what they wanted. The sister looked at these closely and returned them with a look that was kind but unsympathetic. Marlene remembered that look well from parochial school in relation to sloppily done French exercises.

“I’m sorry,” said the nun. “You know, anyone can get these made up.”

“Sister, do we look like Guatemalan assassins? Isabella is a friend of my daughter.” Faint smiles, regrets. A memory blossomed in Marlene’s mind. She rummaged in her bag and extracted the drawing Isabella had done for Lucy. The nuns studied it, conversed briefly in undertones, and returned it.

“Wait here,” said Sister Gregory.

They waited. They heard running steps. Sister Gregory burst into the office, flushed and angry.

“She’s gone!”

“What! When?” cried Marlene.

“She was at lunch,” said Sister Gregory. “It must have been sometime after that. Somebody broke in the bathroom window.”

Harry’s eyes met Marlene’s for an instant, and then he was gone, running out of the office and across the road. A passing semi blocked Marlene from following him, and by the time she got to cabin twelve at the Keystone, Harry was pounding on the door with the butt of his.38 revolver.

He used the pistol to smash the window, reached in, and released the lock and door chain. He turned his head and shouted to Marlene, “Get out of here! Call the cops!” Then he went in.

Marlene drew her.380 automatic and followed behind him. The bathroom door opened and Marlene had the impression of a huge shape filling the doorway, a big man, swarthy, with stiff black hair, wearing a white T-shirt and blue slacks. The blood was pounding in her ears. Something was shouted, but she couldn’t make it out. She shifted to her left to get a clear line on the big man.

Who moved, a great leap, like a forward going for the paint. Harry’s gun went off, twice. Marlene stopped, stunned by the sound.

The big man had Harry down on the floor. They were grappling for the gun. The back of the man’s white T-shirt had a large, round red circle in its middle, like a Japanese flag. Harry fired again. A window shattered. Again. A chunk flew out of the ceiling tile. In a corner of her frozen mind, Marlene knew that Harry was trying to expend all his bullets, because the man on top of him was stronger than he was and in a few more seconds would wrench the pistol away. Another shot.

“He’s got the gun, Marlene! Run!”

The big man struggled to one knee, and Marlene saw that indeed he had the pistol in his hand, holding it by its short barrel and cylinder. He turned to look at Marlene. His eyes were bulging; his face was pale and covered with sweat, and she could see a larger red stain on his chest, spreading around two dark holes in the cloth.

Marlene shot him in the face. His head jerked, but he didn’t fall. There was a hole in his cheek, below the left eye. Incredibly, he rose slowly to his feet. He swayed slightly and looked at the pistol in his hand, as if he barely understood what it was for. Marlene shot her remaining four bullets into his chest. The big man took a step backward; again he looked stupidly at the pistol in his hand, turned it around, and pointed it slowly in Marlene’s direction.

Then, like a man returning after a hard day’s labor, he took a step backward and sat down on the edge of the bed. He opened his mouth, loosing a gush of bright blood. He toppled sideways and slid off onto the floor.

“Are you okay?” asked Harry, getting up.

Marlene was on her hands and knees, retching into the tin wastebasket. She brought the spasms under control, got to her feet.

“Yeah, just great,” she said. “You?”

“My arm’s fucked up, but I’m okay. Jesus, the thing that wouldn’t die.” Marlene went into the bathroom. She rinsed out her mouth at the sink. Fortunately, the mirror had been shattered by a bullet, so that she didn’t have to look at herself. When she came out she made herself look at the corpse.

“Christ, Harry, who the hell is he?”

“Was he,” said Harry. He was going through the items on the bedside table: a.38 Chief’s Special in a woven belt holster, a wallet, a pair of sunglasses, a set of keys, and a black leather badge folder. Harry flipped open the badge folder, revealing an NYPD detective’s gold shield and ID.

“Paul Jackson,” he said. Half consciously, he slipped the shield into his pocket.

The name barely registered with Marlene. “My God! Where’s Isabella?”

They quickly searched the motel room. Nothing. Harry grabbed the keys from the nightstand and ran out to the car. He opened the trunk.

Harry tried to wave Marlene off, but she pushed forward and looked into the trunk. The marks around the girl’s throat were the same as those on the young men in the autopsy photographs.

Marlene screamed. She shouted curses, not the sexual and scatalogical obscenities of the Anglo-Saxons, but the dreadful blasphemies of Sicily, in Sicilian. God was a dog. God was a pig. The Madonna was a whore. Jesus was the son of a diseased whore. She pissed in Christ’s wounds. She cried, great heaving sobs, and smashed her hands again and again against the roof of the car. She tore at her hair. Harry grabbed her and held her still, while the sirens grew in volume.

Harry dealt with the local cops. Marlene sat in Harry’s car and shivered. Harry had given her his suit jacket to wear because she had started shivering. It was stained down the front with Jackson’s blood. She had her hands thrust deep into its side pockets. Her hands closed around something hard and angular, and she drew out the two keys with the red labels and looked at them dumbly.

Then her mind started to function again. A building at 800 some avenue and an apartment on the eighteenth floor. Yes. She had, in fact, been in that very apartment. In less than a minute she had figured the whole thing out.