How Like an Angel

Eighteen

Through the emergency entrance of the San Felice hospital, Sister Blessing was carried on a stretcher. A young interne led Quinn into a waiting room hardly larger than a piano crate, and the questions began.

What was the name of the sick woman? Who was her closest relative? How old was she? Was she under treatment for any chronic disease or infection? What were the initial signs of her present illness? When had she last eaten, and what? Did she vomit? Was the vomitus discolored? Did it have an odor? Did she have difficulty speaking? Breathing? Had she passed any bloody urine or bloody stools? Was there rigidity of the muscles? Twitching? Face livid or flushed? Hands cold or warm? Was she delirious? Drowsy? Were the pupils of her eyes expanded or contracted? Were there burn marks around her mouth and chin?

“I’m sorry, I can’t answer all those questions,” Quinn said. “I’m not a trained medical observer.”

“You did all right. Wait here, please.”

For almost half an hour he was left alone in the room. It was stifling hot and smelled of antiseptic and something sour, the sweat and fear of all the people who had waited in this room before him, and watched the door and prayed. The smell seemed to become stronger until he could taste it in the back of his throat.

He got up to open the door and almost collided on the threshold with a tall, thickset man. He looked like a rancher. He wore a broad-brimmed Stetson hat, a rumpled Western-style suit and, in place of a tie, a leather thong fastened with a large turquoise and silver clip. He had an air of wary cynicism about him, as if he’d spent too much time in places like emergency wards and no good had come out of any of them.

“Your name’s Quinn?”

“Yes.”

“May I see your identification, please?”

Quinn took the papers out of his wallet. The man glanced at them briefly and without much interest, as though obeying a rule he had little use for.

“I’m Sheriff Lassiter.” He returned the papers. “You brought a woman in here about an hour ago?”

“Yes.”

“Friend of yours?”

“I met her ten or eleven days ago.”

“Where?”

“At the Tower of Heaven. It’s a religious cult located in the mountains about fifty miles east of here.”

Lassiter’s expression suggested that he had had dealings at the Tower, and not very pleasant ones. “How come you got mixed up with an outfit like that?”

“By mistake.”

“You haven’t been living there?”

“No.”

“This is going to take all night if you just stand there saying yes and no. Can’t you volunteer some information?”

“I don’t know where to begin.”

“Begin somewhere, that’s all I ask.”

“I drove to the Tower this morning from Chicote.” He went on to explain his meeting Mother Pureza on the road, and his subsequent discovery of the dead man. He described the construction of the inner court, the position of the body in relation to it and the circumstances of the death.

The sheriff listened, his only sign of interest a slight narrowing of the eyes. “Who was the man?”

“George Haywood. He owned a real estate business in Chicote.”

“He fell or was pushed from the top level, no way of knowing which?”

“None that I could see.”

“This is a bad day for your friends, Mr. Quinn.”

“I saw Haywood only once before in my life, you could hardly call him a friend.”

“You saw him only once,” Lassiter repeated, “and yet you identified the body immediately, even though the face was battered in and covered with blood? You must have more highly developed eyesight than the rest of us.”

“I recognized his car.”

“By the license plates?”

“No.”

“The registration on the steering wheel?”

“No. By the make and model.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“Now wait a minute, Mr. Quinn. You saw a car in the vicinity the same make and model as Haywood’s and you immediately assumed it was his?”

“Yes.”

“Why? There are hundreds of identical cars on the roads.”

“Haywood left Chicote a few days ago under peculiar circumstances,” Quinn said. “He told his mother and friends he was flying to Hawaii, but one of his associates checked the airlines and discovered his name wasn’t on any of the flight lists.”

“That’s still a pretty thin reason for jumping to the conclusion that the dead man is Haywood. Unless, of course, you expected to find him at the Tower?”

“I didn’t.”

“You didn’t go there looking for him?”

“No.”

“His presence was a complete surprise to you?”

“It was a surprise.”

“Even in these parts very few people have ever heard of the Tower, let alone know its location. What would a real estate agent from Chicote be doing there?”

“He was dressed as a convert. He wore the regulation robe and his head was shaved.”

Lassiter assumed an expression of exaggerated concern. “You found this body in a strange place, wearing strange clothes, head shaved and face battered to a pulp, and you

identified it positively as belonging to a man you’d seen only once?”

“Not positively. But if you’re a betting man, Sheriff, I’ll give you odds.”

“Officially, I’m not a betting man. Unofficially, what odds?”

“Ten to one.”

“Those are very good odds,” Lassiter said, nodding gravely. “Very good indeed. Makes me kind of wonder what you base them on. Is it possible you haven’t been entirely frank with me, Mr. Quinn?”

“I can’t be entirely frank about Haywood. I know very little about him.”

Someone knocked on the door and Lassiter went out into the corridor for a minute. When he came back his face was flushed and beaded heavily with sweat.

He said, “There was an item in this afternoon’s newspaper about a woman named Haywood. Did you see it?”

“No.”

“She escaped from Tecolote prison yesterday in a supply truck. Early this morning she was picked up wandering around the hills about fifteen miles north of Tecolote. She was suffering from shock and exposure and could give no explanation of her actions. Are the two Haywoods related, by any chance?”

“They’re brother and sister.”

“Now isn’t that interesting. Maybe Miss Haywood was also a friend of yours?”

“I saw her once,” Quinn said wearily. “Which happens to be the same number of times I saw her brother, which doesn’t make either of them exactly a pal of mine.”

“Have you any reason for believing the two Haywoods planned a rendezvous at the Tower?”

“No.”

“It seems a funny coincidence, though, doesn’t it? Haywood disappears, and a couple of days later his sister tries to. Were they pretty chummy?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“You’re a great disappointment to me, Mr. Quinn. I assumed that since you’re a licensed detective you’d be brimming with information which you would naturally pass on to me. But I expect it’s easier to get a license in Nevada than in California?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Well, maybe you’ll find out if you try to get one here,” Lassiter said. “Now about this woman you brought in, what’s her connection with Haywood?”

“I have no idea.”

“I presume she has a name other than Sister Blessing of the Salvation?”

“Mrs. Featherstone. Mary Alice Featherstone.”

“Any close relatives that you know of?”

“A son living in or near Chicago. His name may be Charlie.”

“Is that another of your hunches, Mr. Quinn?”

“Not one I’d care to lay odds on.”

Lassiter went back to the door and addressed someone standing in the corridor outside: “Send Sam over here with the lab car, will you, Bill? And get in touch with the Chicago police, see if they can locate a man called Featherstone, first name possibly Charlie, and tell him his mother’s dead. Somebody fed her enough arsenic to kill a horse.”

In spite of the heat in the room, Quinn had begun to shiver and his throat felt as though a hand had seized it. She was a nurse, he thought. Perhaps she knew right away that she’d been poisoned and who had done it, yet she made no attempt to accuse anyone, or to save her own life by taking an antidote.

He remembered the first night he had talked to her. She had stood in front of the stove rubbing her hands together as if she felt the chill of death in the air: “I am getting old . .. Some of the days are hard to face. My soul is at peace but my body rebels. It longs for some softness, some warmth, some sweetness. Mornings when I get out of bed my spirit feels a touch of heaven, but my feet—oh, the coldness of them, and the aches in my legs. Once in a Sears catalogue I saw a picture of a pair of slippers.... They were the most beautiful slippers I ever did see, but of course an indulgence of the flesh...”

“Come on, Quinn,” Lassiter said. “You’re about to take another trip to the Tower.”

“Why?”

“You seem to know your way around the place. You can act as our guide and interpreter.”

“I prefer not to.”

“I’m not offering you a preference. What’s the matter, feeling a little nervous? Something on your mind?”

“A pair of fuzzy pink slippers.”

“Sorry, we’re fresh out of fuzzy pink slippers. How about a nice cuddly Teddy bear instead?”

Quinn took a long deep breath. “ ‘Having trod the rough earth, my feet uncovered, I will walk the smooth and golden streets of heaven.’ ... I’d like to see Sister Blessing, if I may.”

“You’ll have plenty of time to see her later. She’s not going anywhere.” Lassiter’s mouth stretched in a mirthless smile. “You don’t like that kind of talk, eh, Quinn? Well, here’s my advice, learn to like it. In this business, if you start thinking too seriously about death, you end up cutting out paper dolls at the funny farm.”

“I’ll take that chance, Sheriff.”

Quinn rode in the back seat with Lassiter while a deputy in uniform drove the car. A second car followed, containing two more deputies and portable lab equipment.

It was four o’clock and still very warm. As soon as they were outside the city limits Lassiter took off his hat and coat and unbuttoned his shirt collar.

“How well did you know this Sister Blessing, Quinn?”

“I talked to her a couple of times.”

“Then how come you got all choked up at her death?”

“I liked her very much. She was a fine, intelligent woman.”

“Somebody evidently didn’t share your high opinion of her. Any idea who?”

Quinn looked out of the window, wishing there was a way he could tell the sheriff about O’Gorman’s murder without bringing in the letter to Martha O’Gorman. He had promised Martha never to mention it to anyone, but he was beginning to realize that his promise might be impossible to keep.

“I have reason to believe,” he said carefully, “that Sister Blessing was acting as the friend and confidante of a murderer.”

“Someone inside the colony?”

“Yes.”

“A stupid and reckless position for a woman you describe as intelligent.”

“In order to understand the situation, you have to understand more about the colony itself. It operates as a unit almost entirely separated from the rest of the country. The True Believers, as they call themselves, do not feel bound to obey our laws or follow our customs. When a man enters the Tower he sheds his other life completely, his name, his family, his worldly goods, and, last but not least, his sins. Under our system it’s illegal to harbor a murderer. But look at it from the viewpoint of the sect: the victim belonged to a world they no longer recognized, the crime is punishable under laws they don’t believe in or consider valid. In her own eyes Sister Blessing was not acting as an accessory after the fact of murder. Neither were the others, if they knew about the murder, and that’s a big if.”

“You’re making a lot of excuses for her, Quinn.”

“She doesn’t need my excuses,” Quinn said. “I’m only trying to help you realize that in a short time you’ll be dealing with people whose attitudes are vastly different from your own. You’re not going to change them, so you might as well understand them.”

“You sound like a member of the Peace Corps making a report on Cuckooland,”

“Cuckooland may not be quite as cuckoo as you think.”

“All right, all right, I get the message.” Lassiter yanked irritably at his collar as if he were being choked by new ideas. “So how do you fit into the picture?”

“I’d lost my shirt in Reno and was hitchhiking a ride to San Felice to collect a debt. The driver, a man named Newhouser, works on a ranch near the Tower. He was in a hurry to get home and couldn’t take me all the way to San Felice. I went to the Tower for food and water. During the course of my overnight stay there, Sister Blessing asked me to find a man called Patrick O’Gorman. Just find him, that’s all. I have the impression now that at the time she hired me she wasn’t even sure O’Gorman had ever existed. It’s possible that, when the murderer confessed killing O’Gorman, Sister Blessing didn’t quite believe it, she thought the whole business might have been a delusion. Naturally she wanted to find out the truth, although it meant breaking the rules of the colony and subsequent punishment. As it turned out, no delusion was involved. O’Gorman had existed all right. He was murdered near Chicote five and a half years ago.”

“You told the Sister this?”

“Yes, a week ago.”

“Did it frighten her?”

“No.”

“She wasn’t afraid that the murderer might regret confessing his crime and make sure she didn’t inform anyone else?”

“Apparently not. According to Karma, the girl who was with her this morning, Sister Blessing was in high spirits, singing about a good day coming.”

“Well, it didn’t get here,” Lassiter said grimly. “Not for her, anyway. What made her imagine there was a good day coming?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps she was thinking not of herself but of the colony as a whole. It’s been going downhill for a number of years and the appearance of a new convert must have been encouraging.”

“Meaning George Haywood, or the man you think is George Haywood?”

“Yes. She had no reason that I know of to suspect Haywood wasn’t a genuine convert.”

“Someone else obviously had,” Lassiter said. “Now that’s a funny thing, isn’t it?—Sister Blessing knew a week ago that the murder was no delusion, it had happened, and yet it wasn’t until Haywood appeared on the scene that the murderer made sure she wouldn’t talk. How do you figure it, Quinn?”

“I don’t.”

“What’s the present size of the colony?”

“There are twenty-seven people, including two children and the sixteen-year-old girl, Karma.”

“Can you eliminate any of them as suspects?”

“The children, certainly, and Karma. Sister Blessing was Karma’s only hope of getting away from the colony and going to live with her aunt in Los Angeles, The Master himself would probably have to be eliminated—at the time of O’Gorman’s murder he was in charge of the colony when it was still located in the San Gabriel Mountains. His wife, Mother Pureza, is both frail and senile, which makes her an unlikely prospect.”

“Poisoning doesn’t require brawn or brains.”

“I don’t believe any female members of the colony are involved in the murder.”

“Why?”

Quinn knew the answer but he couldn’t say it aloud: The letter to Martha O’Gorman was written by a man. “It seems improbable to me. Sister Blessing’s role in the community was almost as vital as the Master’s. She was the nurse, the manager, the housekeeper. The mother figure, I guess the psychologists would call her. Pureza’s title of mother is purely nominal. She doesn’t, and probably never did, function in that capacity.”

“Tell me about some of the men in the group.”

“Brother Crown of Thorns is the mechanic, a bad-tempered semiliterate, and probably the most fanatic believer of them all. Since he reported Sister Blessing’s infringement of the rules and caused her punishment, she had reason to dislike him and quite probably he didn’t like her, either. But I can’t see him committing a murder unless he received his instructions in a vision. Brother Tongue of Prophets is a timid neurotic suffering from partial aphasia.”

“What the hell’s aphasia?”

“Inability to talk. He is, or was, as dependent on Sister Blessing as a little boy, and for that reason an unlikely suspect. Brother of the Steady Heart, the barber, poses as a jolly fat man, but I’m not sure he is. Brother Light of the Infinite, who looks after the livestock, is humorless and hard-working. Perhaps he works to the point of exhaustion in order to purge himself of guilt. At any rate he had access to poison in the form of sheep dip. Brother Behold the Vision is the butcher and the cheesemaker. I saw him only briefly, at a distance. I don’t know any of the others by name.”

“It seems to me you know quite a lot for a man who allegedly spent only a short time at the Tower.”

“Sister Blessing was a good talker, I’m a good listener.”

“Are you now,” Lassiter said dryly. “Well, listen to this: I don’t believe a word you’ve told me.”

“You’re not trying, Sheriff.”

The car had started to climb and the altitude was already having an effect on Lassiter. Even the slight exertion of talking made him breathe faster and more heavily, and, although he was not tired or bored, he yawned frequently.

“Slow down on the curves, Bill. These bloody mountains give me the heaves.”

“Think about something else, Sheriff,” the deputy said earnestly. “You know, nice things. Trees. Music. Food.”

“Food, eh?”

“Roast prime ribs, medium rare, baked potatoes—”

“Forget the whole thing, will you?”

“Yes, sir.”

Lassiter leaned his head against the back seat and closed his eyes. “Do they know I’m coming, Quinn?”

“I told the Master I intended to report Haywood’s death.”

“What kind of reception do you think I’ll get?”

“Don’t expect a brass band.”

“Damn it, I don’t like these cases involving a bunch of nuts. Sane people are bad enough, but at least you can predict how they’re about to act. Like you said, this is practically going into a foreign country where they don’t speak our language, observe our laws—”

“Welcome to the Peace Corps,” Quinn said.

“Thanks, but I’m not joining.”

“You’ve been drafted, Sheriff.”

In the front seat the deputy’s shoulders shook in silent laughter. The sheriff leaned forward and spoke softly into his ear: “What’s so funny, Bill?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“That’s how I figure it. Nothing’s funny. So I’m not laughing.”

“Neither am I, sir. It’s just the altitude, it gives me hiccups.”

Lassiter turned his attention back to Quinn. “Think they’ll try and keep us out? I’d like to be forewarned if there’s going to be any violence.”

“Theoretically they don’t believe in violence.”

“Theoretically neither do I. But I sometimes have to use it.”

“They have no weapons that I know of. Unless you count sheer force of numbers.”

“Oh, I count it all right.”

Lassiter’s right hand moved instinctively toward the gun in his holster. Quinn noticed the gesture and felt a protest rising inside him. He thought of Mother Pureza the way he had first seen her, looking up at the sky as if she expected it to open for her, and the Master, torn between pity and duty, trying to guide her back from her wanderings through the halls of her childhood... Brother Tongue with the little bird on his shoulder to speak for him... Brother of the Steady Heart plying his razor, and like any barber anywhere, talking about anything: “In my day, the ladies were fragile, and had small, delicate feet.”…

He remembered the harassed voice of Brother Light as he brought the can of sheep dip into the storage shed: “I have a hundred things to do, but Sister says I must fix the mattress or the stranger will be eaten alive by fleas.”... And Brother Crown, the prophet of doom: “We all carry a devil around inside us, gnawing our innards.”

Quinn said, in a voice that sounded ragged, gnawed by his own devil, “There must be no violence.”

“Tell them that.”

“I’m telling you first. By your own aggression, you might scare them into acts of destruction.”

“More Peace Corps stuff, Quinn?”

“Call it that if you like.”

“You suddenly bucking for sergeant in the army of the Lord? Maybe you’re hearing voices, too, eh?”

“That’s right,” Quinn said. “I’m hearing voices.”

One, in particular: “I have renounced the world and its evils. I have renounced the flesh and its weakness. I seek the solace of the spirit, the salvation of the soul. Having done without comfort, I will be comforted by the Lord. Having hungered, I will feast. Having trod the rough earth, my feet uncovered, I will walk the smooth and golden streets of heaven. Having here forsaken the pride of ornament, I will be of infinite beauty. Having humbled myself in the fields, I will walk tall and straight in the hereafter, which does belong to the True Believers.”

Quinn looked out at the desolate landscape. I hope you’ve made it, Sister. I hope to God you’ve made it.