“‘Us’?”
She looked up with a smile full of rue. “It went up with the building, but I had a framed certificate from the Mexicantown International Welcome Center naming me an honorary Chicana. Nothing’s meant more to me since I took my vows.”
“How come?”
“That’s an insensitive question.”
“So give me a sensitive answer.”
“They’re a proud people with a rich heritage. They don’t let just anyone in.”
I said, “They don’t need you.”
“What?” She sat on her heels, bracing her sooty gloved hands on her thighs.
“Suppose, single-handedly, you turn Mexicantown into the garden center of the Midwest. People will say the locals couldn’t have done it without a good old Anglo-Saxon at the wheel. Suppose you fail. They’ll say, well, how much could anyone do with such a shiftless people? They’ve had plenty of that without your help. They don’t need you.”
“What are you saying?”
“I just said it.”
“I should give up.”
“That’d be a waste of talent. The world’s full of causes in need of a leader. I’m saying you should turn this one over to the people you say you want to help.”
“And what if they fail?”
“They fail.”
“Just let them drown.”
“Or let them learn to swim.”
“Pull themselves up by their bootstraps? And where will the boots come from?”
“They’re no good if they’re borrowed.”
“I’m glad to say not everyone is as cynical as you.”
“I didn’t say they would fail. They should have the chance to, all on their own. Or to succeed the same way. It’s the only kind of success that counts.”
“Who are you, Horatio Alger?”
“The trouble with you earnest types is you get so caught up in the cause you forget you’re not alone. You think you’re the only one who can save the situation. Little by little, you start to feel contempt for the people you’re trying to help. When that happens, the consequences of your actions don’t matter. Just the actions.”
“Not Horatio Alger. Ayn Rand, maybe; but I don’t think of you as having a political opinion of any kind.”
I wasn’t sure who that was, so I let it slide. “That was a lucky break, getting up to go for supplies just when that Molotov cocktail came through the window.”
“The Lord looks after me.” She returned to her sorting. “A lot of people in the Order thought I turned my back on Him when I left the Church. I never did; and as it turned out, He didn’t turn His back on me either.”
“He gave up on Siete in the end.”
“Domingo had his chances. We all get plenty, but the well has a bottom.”
“The Church says it’s never too late.”
“That’s where we broke. You can’t just coast along counting on a deathbed confession to save you in the end.”
“That go for Zorborón too?”
“He found the bottom before I came along.”
I watched her play her game of solitaire. My legs would long since have gone to sleep in that position, but she’d never had a bullet in one.
I said, “It’s a wonder you waited as long as you did.”
She turned over three more scraps of half-incinerated paper, rejected one as unreclaimable, and stacked the others before looking up. “Waited?”
I shifted gears again. “I looked up your school transcripts.”
“I could’ve saved you the trouble. All you had to do was ask. I didn’t make the dean’s list.”
“You didn’t have to. You mentioned you’d studied science at the University of Detroit before you decided to become a nun. The people in charge of Records wouldn’t give me the time of day, but a party whose name I wouldn’t mention in interrogation is longer on talent than discretion. Chemistry was your interest, two semesters. According to Ray Charla, anyone with rudimentary chemistry training could have mixed up enough cyclostyrene to blow up the City-County Building.”
“Someone blew it up? I guess the doings in the neighborhood shoved that one right off the front page.”
“Now you’re just vamping. Not like you.”
She arranged what she’d stacked into a jigsaw puzzle. Her concentration seemed to have deepened.
“It was that second bottle did you in,” I said.
She gave up then, pushed the papers away from her, and sat back once again on her heels. “It’s been a generation since catechism, and you’re no good at making up riddles anyway. Your mind’s too direct.”
“So is a turtle’s. He gets there eventually.”
“Does the same go for this conversation?”
“Charla found what was left of two bottles close together in the rubble in your office. Someone filled one with super-accelerant, the other with common drain cleaner and aluminum foil. MacGyver would’ve been proud.”
She scratched the side of her jaw, leaving another streak of black. “You don’t have to spend much time at street level in this town to know aluminum foil and drain cleaner makes a dandy low-grade bomb. You sure don’t need a knowledge of the table of elements.”
“You also don’t need to risk throwing an explosive device through a window and maybe being seen. Anyone could figure how far to fill the drain-cleaner bottle to leave enough air for the bomb to go off on delayed-action. Then all he’d have to do is tape it to a bottle of gasoline or charcoal lighter fluid—or cyclostyrene—plant it near enough to a window from the inside to make it look as if it had been thrown through the glass, and make arrangements to be out of range when it went off. The blast would blow out the window, and with all the ash and debris lying around afterward, it’d be almost impossible for even an arson expert to say whether the window shattered from outside or inside. There’d be plenty of glass fragments on both sides and not enough difference to make a case against the so-called victim.
“You were the only witness to the bombing,” I said. “No one else saw or heard anything until the fire broke out. The entire police theory was built on what you gave them.”
She was a rock under pressure; but then I said before it takes a strong constitution to live in a world of confessions and still maintain equilibrium. “The witness lied. Pretty theory. Too bad it depends on the person who set the bomb coming away unscathed.” She held up her hands, bandaged under the rubber gloves.
“Minor burns. Even the EMS attendants didn’t put up much of an argument when you bailed out of the stretcher. Just how much air to leave in the bottle depends on variables like humidity and temperature, which this time of year is a crapshoot. You timed your run well enough to avoid serious incineration, but you were a half-second off to keep from getting a piece of it. My thought? It blew up just after you finished planting it, when your hands were still inside the edge of the blast. That turned out okay for you, because it went a little more toward eliminating you as a suspect. A crime-scene purist might question the splash pattern; but who around here would consider Sister Delia a suspect, knowing her dedication to the citizens of Mexicantown?”
“So I’m a fraud. What’s my end? Munchausen by proxy? Set myself up as a hero so I can warm myself in the glow of public adoration?”
“Not you. The dedication’s real. You applied yourself to the task of ridding the neighborhood of its bad element. It’s why you made yourself out a gang target, so it looked like the bad element wanted to knock the mortar out from under the cornerstones. First you sacrificed the paint job on your car, posing as a victim. Penny-ante stuff, not meant to draw much attention at the time—wouldn’t do to spark an official investigation too soon—but torching your office nailed it tight, and right on schedule. After that, no one in the world would suspect you of killing Zorborón.”
She laughed; I wish she hadn’t. It had the shrill edge of hysteria, like rats fighting between walls. “How’d I do that? I forget.”
“A garage is a noisy, public place
, people coming in and going out through the bay doors without the employees taking much notice because of the traffic volume. You wouldn’t have needed much of a disguise—a cold spring makes anyone in a stocking cap and a bulky coat invisible—maybe you didn’t bother. You can get too clever with that kind of thing and draw more attention to yourself.
“Anyway, no one paid much attention when you let yourself into El Tigre’s office and shot him between the eyes. That doesn’t take much skill at close range, especially when he wouldn’t be expecting Sister Delia to give him anything but a good tongue-lashing, and he was used to that. He trained as a boxer, so his reflexes were better than average, even allowing for middle-age slowdown. And he was a cautious man by virtue of his profession. But the worst he had to fear from you was a picket line, he thought. And so he was sitting comfortably behind his desk when you put a bullet in his brain.
“The noise was no problem,” I said, “not with one of the Tijuana twins banging the bejesus out of a hunk of metal on the workbench and the other using an air wrench. I never got a good look at that gun you showed me. Not a big caliber, I’m guessing. You bought it for your personal protection, not to hunt elk.”
She stopped laughing as if a breaker had been tripped. She was still kneeling with her weight on her heels and her hands on her thighs, as if she’d been interrupted in the middle of planting petunias. She dusted off her rubber-encased palms and let one drop inside the macramé bag, rustling among the charred papers inside. She put all her attention to it as if the next piece she excavated would unlock the key to her whole filing system. “Proof?”
I stroked the arms of my chair, watching the movement inside the bag. “Ray Charla found the tool you used to scratch those naughty words and pictures on your car. The paint chips should be easy to match.”
Her hand stopped groping.
“You overdid it with Siete,” I went on. “In six months, maybe less, he’d be no one’s headache but the coroner’s. But you thought you needed a fall guy—two, counting Luís Guerrera, the obvious choice based on gang ambition—and it took two more obstacles out of the way between Mexicantown as it is and the one you had in mind. Did you help him along with that shot of black tar heroin, or did he provide it himself? It won’t matter to the judge or jury, but it’s a hobby of mine to tie off all the broken blood vessels.”
“I suppose someone’s recording all this.”
I shook my head. I kept my eyes on her bag. “I’m allergic to adhesive tape. Anyway, the cops have all the evidence they need. The Molotov cocktail with a time delay—you’re well-known here, if you bought the ingredients locally, some clerk will remember—the paint scraps to lay the deal off on the young werewolves; I don’t know if the cops will ever be able to tie you to Zorborón tight enough to make a case, but those forensics types are clever. They can match one exploded bomb to another well enough to say it was the same party both times. The rest is courtroom pyrotechnics.”
She shook her head, an eminently sad gesture that reminded me of Zorborón just before he’d ordered Nolo Suiz to wring a rooster’s neck. They were the same person, chained to a set of values created by themselves. “All this for a better world.”
“Worse has been done for less. Zorborón out of the picture, El Hermano too, the Maldados and Zapatistas neutralized; they hanged John Brown for insurrection, but he’s a hero to the anti-slavery movement. If I were you I’d retain Rafael Buho. He’s a good lawyer, just unscrupulous enough to know how to put virtue to good use. By the time he’s finished you’ll look like Delia of Detroit, the patron saint of immigrants and hopeless cases.”
“I never wanted that. If I were successful and no one remembered me, that would be all right. A lot of good has come from bad. Christ knew that. Whether the good was good enough is up to Him to decide.”
The world kept turning, as it will. Little pieces of something clinked musically on the roof, like a chandelier shedding its pendants; freezing rain. The police cruisers would need to slow down on icy corners.
“He was dead when I got there,” she said, “Siete was. Anyway, he wasn’t breathing.”
I wasn’t either. I hadn’t realized I’d stopped until that moment. I took care of it with a long intake followed by a gust of pent-up air. But I kept my eyes on that bag.
“It didn’t matter,” she said. “I was pretty sure I’d find him passed out; that was his natural state near the end. If Guerrera was there, or anyone else, I’d have called it off and tried again later. As the angel of Mexicantown I didn’t need an excuse to visit anywhere in the neighborhood. I might even save a soul, and who’s to know what I was carrying in my bag?” Her hand came out of it wrapped around a pistol no larger than a novelty cigarette lighter.
Size didn’t matter: the same .25 caliber had been enough for Zorborón. A professional would have ditched it, but murder is almost always committed by amateurs, and who would have frisked her?
“Don’t bother to get up,” she said. “I’m no lady.”
I sat gripping the arms of the rocking chair while she gathered her legs and pushed herself to her feet.
“Make yourself at home—please. Count to ten slowly before you leave. I’ll be counting on the other side of the door.”
“Pure pulp,” I said, “and from a saint. There must be something better in the New Testament.”
“Try quoting it in Mexicantown. See how far you get.”
“You took the words right out of my mouth. Where does the angel of Mexicantown go when she’s on the run?”
“Call it animal instinct. I’m not a martyr, no matter what you might think.”
I tightened my grip to steady the rocker and rose.
The little square pistol followed me. “Don’t get up, I said.”
“I’m not Zorborón or Siete, Delia. So far everything you’ve done you did for what you saw as right. Why be inconsistent now?” I held out my hand for the gun.
She was bolted to the floor, the semiautomatic grafted to her hand. With her clothes and face smudged she looked like a grown-up Little Orphan Annie, if Annie had wandered into Dick Tracy.
I kept my right hand where it was, palm up. That was my gun hand; but the Smith & Wesson was behind my right hip bone. I might as well have checked it at the bus station. The first time I needed it, really needed it, it was out of reach.
I was watching the hand holding the pistol, not the woman who belonged to the hand. Against the advice of TV detectives I ignored her face, her eyes. She wasn’t gripping the trigger with her eyes. I was watching when the rubber covering her index finger creased at the joint, applying pressure to the trigger.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Despite its larger size, a .25 doesn’t pack the same punch as a .22; it all has to do with percussion and velocity. Aiming is mostly a matter of luck because of the lightness of the frame and a design intended more for easy concealment than target shooting. Any ballistics expert will tell you your chances are better standing still and taking the bullet in the body than making a rash move that might put it in your eye or nick a major artery.
Any ballistics expert, that is, who has never faced one in the hand of a killer who’s struck twice and hasn’t anything to lose.
I lunged toward the weapon, grasping at her wrist to jerk it up; but I chose the wrong leg to propel me, the bad one, and lost a tenth of a second I couldn’t afford. A slug needs a lot less than that at close range. I was six inches short for the time. A lifetime.
The Lord had switched sides. She didn’t squeeze the trigger.
She flinched at the sudden movement, but her finger loosened—deliberately, I thought later—and I scooped the pistol out of her hand with no resistance on her end.
For a while I stood there, breathing as heavily as if I’d run a marathon, the small flat gun lying in my palm like a compass. She seemed not to be breathing at all. There was no expression on her face and nothing behind it. I watched her pupils contract as if she were on a heavy-duty drug. For a moment her arm stayed
where it was, bent at the elbow with her hand gripping a phantom weapon, then slid slowly down to her side.
The physical threat was over; now came the chaser. I was looking at her face now, at the blood sliding out from under the skin in a flat sheet, and anticipated the moment when it stopped supplying oxygen to her brain. I dropped the gun into my side pocket and stepped forward in time to catch her. She was a tall woman and strong-boned; a disc jinked in my back and the tendons strained behind my knees, but I kept us both off the floor. I lowered her to the rug. She was as gray as ash. I inventoried her vital signs. They were all in place.
I took out the pistol and sniffed the barrel. It smelled like a spent match, a little stale after a couple of days. I sprang the clip. Two gone, counting the one that jacked itself into the chamber after she shot El Tigre. I put it back together and returned it to my pocket.
Standing there with my feet straddling her I got out my cell, dropped it, and picked it up. I cleared the screen twice before I got the number right. Now that the thing was finished I had trouble focusing on the numbers. My fingers were as nimble as hooves.
Alderdyce answered as politely as always. “What now?”
“Did I interrupt your devotions?”
“Just speak.”
“It was Sister Delia.”
“Who says?”
“She does.” I told him the rest.
“The fuck you say.”
“We already talked about it.”
“I was counting on you being wrong.”
“Me too.”
“I never thought she’d pull a gun.”
“Me too.”
“But I wouldn’t think she’d miss.”
I started to say, “Me too” again, then started over. “It turned out she cares a lot more about protecting the neighborhood than herself.”
Burning Midnight Page 21
