The Missing Madonna

by Carol Anne O'Marie

  That settled, Caroline went back to dividing. “When we are through here, Lucy, you and I can go back to the college and search through the alumnae records.” She tipped her skimmer toward the Sisters for tacit permission. “I’m sure we will be able to unearth a Barbara in Erma’s class, or in one close to it, who lives in the vicinity of St. Louis,” she said when the Sisters had nodded back. “Between us, we can make the calls.

  “Marie, you, of course, should contact your brothers. See if they perhaps know where your mother has gone. Possibly she confided in one of the boys.

  “Noelle, you’re good with government-type things. Perhaps you could place calls to the St. Louis Police Department and to hospitals, just in case—and I hate to even mention it—something may have happened to Erma.

  “Mr. Finn”—Caroline had clearly thought out her plan—“there must be an organization of restaurant owners or something of that nature in that area . . .”

  The man squinted at her as if she had just dropped in from another planet. “You talking about the waitresses’ union?”

  “I suppose I am.” Caroline cleared her throat. “And you, Sisters”—Mary Helen tried not to appear too eager—“you two can do what you do best: pray.”

  * * *

  “Pray, indeed!” Mary Helen muttered, fumbling in her pocketbook for the car keys. On the curb behind her, she could hear Eileen chuckling.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked without turning around.

  “If you could have seen your face, old dear, when Caroline said, ‘Pray.’ You got so red, I was afraid you might burst.”

  “I did no such thing.” Mary Helen finally unlocked the car door. “I was just surprised, that’s all.”

  “Oh, and what, may I ask, surprised you?”

  “That the poor woman does not know that prayer without good works is dead.”

  “Isn’t that faith without good works, old dear?”

  “Same difference.” Mary Helen adjusted her bifocals, then fastened her seat belt.

  She turned the key in the ignition. “And if she thinks for one moment that I’m going to let my prayers die, she has another think coming.”

  “I could well have predicted that,” Eileen muttered, her brogue thickening.

  “By the way,” Mary Helen asked, eager to change the subject, “what did you make of that little scene between Ree and Mr. Finn just now?”

  “I was about to ask you the same question,” Eileen said. “But since you asked me first, I would say that, deep down, those two have a couple of ill-stirred pots about to come to a full boil.”

  Mary Helen had never heard her say that before. “Is that another of your old sayings from home?”

  “No, I just made it up,” Eileen said with a complacent smile. “And what do you make of it?”

  “Just about the same as you do.” Mary Helen checked her wristwatch. “We’re in luck,” she said. “It’s only eleven-thirty. We can surely make it to the Hall of Justice before Kate Murphy goes to lunch.”

  * * *

  Sister Mary Helen was surprised when she and Eileen walked into the Hall of Justice. The police department had erected a plywood barricade across the entire foyer. Well, what can you expect? she asked herself. After all, you haven’t been in the building for nearly two years. Things do change.

  A security checkpoint, much like that in an airport, had been built at one end. It instructed them ENTER HERE.

  “Where are you going, ladies?” the uniformed officer asked, returning their pocketbooks.

  “To the Homicide Detail,” Mary Helen answered. The policeman looked a little surprised, she thought, but not nearly as surprised as Kate Murphy did when she saw the two of them in the doorway of Room 450. And poor Inspector Gallagher! Flabbergasted was the only word that would adequately describe his reaction.

  “Hi, Sisters,” Kate called.

  The crowded detail suddenly became still. One by one the homicide detectives turned their heads toward the doorway. Some smiled, some half rose. O’Connor, whom she remembered from the last time she was here, offered a weak, “Hi, ’Sters!”

  The room was much the same as Mary Helen remembered it. If anything, it was more cluttered with more papers. Perhaps an additional wooden desk or two had been shoved together on the cramped floor space.

  Suit jackets were slung over the backs of swivel chairs, just the way she remembered. Looking around the room, you would swear that these tall, burly men were nothing more than messy real-estate agents—except, of course, for the gun each one had strapped in his shoulder holster or onto his belt.

  Kate crossed the room, smiling, and gave each of the nuns a hug. “So nice to see you,” she said.

  Mary Helen smiled back. Kate looked wonderful. Married life seemed to really be agreeing with her. If she had changed at all, she was more slim and trim than she had been. Not a speck of gray shone in her red hair. There was a peaceful expression on her open, freckled face. Mary Helen did notice faint shadows under Kate’s Wedgwood-blue eyes and wondered, for a moment, what that was all about.

  Across the room, Inspector Dennis Gallagher stood by his desk next to a large window, his face flushed. As he struggled to refasten his tie, the man made a feeble attempt to look pleased to see them. Actually, Mary Helen thought, his expression was more like a grimace.

  “Come in, come in.” Kate ushered the nuns through the maze of phones and filing cabinets and pulled up two chairs next to the pushed-together desks she and Gallagher shared.

  “What brings you here today?” Behind her, Mary Helen could hear the quiet room become even quieter. Like one of those old commercials on TV where E. F. Hutton speaks, she thought, amused.

  Kate may have looked at Eileen, or perhaps Eileen only thought she did.

  “I’ll be switched if I can figure it out,” she heard her friend whisper, her brogue a bit on the thick side.

  “Sister?” Kate smiled, looking first at Mary Helen. Then she looked around the detail, with what the old nun thought could only be described as a glare. Slowly, the typewriters and phone dials began to make noise again.

  Gallagher perched his ample bottom on the edge of one desk, hitched up his trouser legs, and leaned forward, ready to listen. “Tell us what’s on your mind, ’Ster?”

  Clearing her throat, Mary Helen slowly shoved her bifocals up the bridge of her nose and looked from inspector to inspector. “You remember, of course, Kate, my calling you yesterday about my OWL friend, Erma Duran?”

  Kate nodded.

  “Well, not one of us OWLs has seen or heard from her for almost a week now. We are really becoming very concerned.” She paused for effect. It must have worked.

  Inspector Gallagher leaned over even farther and began to dig into his pockets, searching, Mary Helen assumed, for his cigar. She spotted it in the full ashtray behind him. Better for his lungs and heart if I let him search, she thought, switching her attention back to Kate.

  “Today several of us met with her daughter and her employer. Strangely, neither of them has heard from Erma either.”

  Kate frowned and began to twist a thick lock of her hair. Good! Mary Helen knew full well that was a sign the girl was thinking.

  “A whole week, you say?”

  “One week tomorrow, to be exact.”

  Gallagher found his cigar and scratched a match on the under edge of his desktop. “But no body, huh, ’Ster?” He squinted one eye against the smoke rising from the stub.

  Sitting taller in her chair, Mary Helen put on her best schoolmarm face. Gallagher, she suspected, was about to dismiss her as worrying without cause. “As you know, Inspector, finding no body does not necessarily mean that no harm has come to the woman.”

  Grinning, Gallagher pushed himself off the edge of the desk, put his cigar back in the ashtray, and, with his hands free, tucked his shirt into his pants. “You’re absolutely right, ’Ster.” He shrugged his shoulder. “But what it does mean is that if there is no body, then there is no case for Homicide.�
��

  Mary Helen frowned. In her opinion, Inspector Gallagher looked and sounded entirely too pleased. She wasn’t about to be put off so easily. She turned back toward Kate.

  “What I think we should do, Sisters”—Kate folded her hands on the desk in front of her and studied her thumbnails—“is turn you over to Missing Persons.”

  If Mary Helen hadn’t known better, she would have suspected from the look on her face that Kate Murphy was a bit too pleased also.

  Removing her earring, Kate picked up the phone receiver and dialed.

  “Isn’t it just down the hallway?” Mary Helen mouthed to Gallagher.

  “They moved it.” Gallagher stared out the window at the James Lick Freeway. “Missing Persons has gone over with Juvenile, to the old Northern Station on Greenwich. They’re moving everything around. Nothing’s the same as it used to be.”

  “Okay, Sisters.” Kate slammed down the receiver. “It’s all set. That was Inspector Ronald Honore. He’s from Missing Persons. Honore is swamped this afternoon, but call him first thing on Monday morning. He’ll help you make out a report if you still need one.”

  Kate scribbled on a scrap of paper. “Here is his name”—she handed the note to Mary Helen—“his phone number, and where you can find him.”

  As they left the detail, Mary Helen was almost certain she heard Gallagher say, “Hot damn, Katie-girl! Those two couldn’t happen to a nicer guy!”

  “Why were you so quiet in there?” Mary Helen asked, suddenly realizing that Sister Eileen had said almost nothing while they were in Room 450.

  “I just can’t seem to get over it.” Eileen took a deep breath and stepped into the elevator. “It must be from when I was a girl back home. The garda inhibits me. So many of them all together in that one room.”

  Mary Helen stared at her friend. “Glory be to God, Eileen. You left Ireland well over fifty years ago. And then you were probably not even twenty years old. Besides which, you lived in the country. How much experience could you have possibly had with the garda? Besides, nothing inhibits you.”

  Eileen pulled herself up to her full height. “There are some things, Mary Helen, that are part of a person’s heritage. Some things you are born to and brought up with that you just don’t forget. Some things that are just part and parcel of a person.”

  Mary Helen narrowed her eyes at her friend. “Eileen, have you been listening to the Clancy Brothers and those Irish rebellion ballads again?”

  Her short nose in the air, Sister Eileen walked out of the Hall of Justice several paces ahead of Sister Mary Helen.

  Outside, the day was gray and drizzly. A sharp wind whipped down Bryant Street, bowing the sycamores in front of the Hall. The sky looked as though someone had shaded in the whole thing with a number-two pencil. Overhead, one small spot of gray was a little brighter than the rest. Probably the sun trying to break through, although Mary Helen thought the effect was as if someone in heaven had turned on a forty-watt bulb.

  When they reached the car, the old nun studied the scrap of paper Kate had given her. It read “Inspector Ron Honore, 2475 Greenwich” and gave the phone number and the extension.

  Even though Eileen was fiddling with her own seat belt, she must have noticed what Mary Helen was doing. “Kate said to call the man on Monday.” Mary Helen noted the wary edge in her friend’s voice. “You are not planning to go in there now?”

  “Not in”—Mary Helen tried to sound incredulous that Eileen would even think such a thing—“just by.”

  “Is that a good idea?” Eileen’s question hung in the air. Mary Helen didn’t answer. It seemed better that way.

  The downtown streets around the Hall of Justice always confused her. Some were one-way. Some put you right on the freeway heading to San Jose. And some led you to God knew where.

  Trying to be helpful, Eileen peered at the signs and arrows along Harrison Street, reading them aloud. “Let’s head for Van Ness,” she said finally. “We know for sure that goes across town. From there we can get home.”

  Mary Helen smiled. Eileen must be confused too. That made her feel a little better. Surely, Van Ness or at least South Van Ness must be around there somewhere. Under the freeway, Mary Helen made a quick right turn.

  “Mary Helen! Not here!”

  Jerking her foot off the gas pedal, heart pounding, Mary Helen looked both ways, but she couldn’t see what she had done wrong.

  “What is it, Eileen?” she asked, her knees shaking.

  Eileen pointed to the street sign, her gray eyes open in horror. “You turned onto 13th, old dear. Could there be a more unlucky street in all of San Francisco?”

  Behind them, horns honked impatiently. Mary Helen could feel her blood pressure rise. “You and your blasted superstitions” was all she had the strength to say, for which she was grateful—not nearly so grateful, however, as Eileen should have been.

  Relieved when they finally spotted the sign for South Van Ness, Mary Helen turned right. As they inched their way along the wide boulevard and across the City, Eileen seemed a little sheepish.

  She didn’t even object, Mary Helen noticed, when they passed the Opera Plaza and Turk Street, where they should have turned for the college. She did grunt when they went by Tommy’s Joynt on the corner of Van Ness and Geary. But that was understandable. It was nearly lunchtime, and although buffalo stew might not sound very appealing, the hot turkey sandwich did. At the thought of it, her own stomach growled.

  By the time they had passed Hippo’s Hamburgers and neared the towering stone edifice of St. Brigid’s Church, Sister Eileen had seemingly resigned herself to the inevitable.

  Silently the pair zipped past Phillip Mason’s Hair Salon and around a parked Muni bus. “The next one’s Greenwich,” Eileen announced with a little edge on her voice. Apparently she had recovered from feeling sheepish. “And I am starving. So let’s make short work of whatever you have in mind. And I dare not even imagine what that might be.” She shuddered.

  The old Northern Station was sandwiched in the middle of a block of well-kept stucco homes, flats, and modern apartment buildings. The station itself, with its large ornate lanterns over the entrance steps, was a leftover from the Pan American Exposition of 1915.

  Only nine years after the earthquake and fire, Mary Helen had read somewhere, the city had filled in land from the Bay, built the magnificent Palace of Fine Arts, and played host to the exposition. The Northern Station at the far end of the landfill had guarded it all.

  Mary Helen drove by the building once, turned, and drove by again. “As long as we’re here, we may just as well go in, meet the man and say, How do,” she said, as if it were a sudden idea.

  “I wish I had placed a wager” was Eileen’s only comment as she unbuckled her seat belt.

  “Can I help you, ladies?” a slight police inspector with thick, curly gray hair greeted them the moment they opened the glass front door. He must have been watching them parallel park. And he would have had plenty of time, Mary Helen figured. It always took her several tries to get close enough to the curb to be legal.

  “We were just looking for Inspector Honore.” She peeked into the next room, which, from the door at least, looked just as crowded, if not as large, as the Homicide Detail.

  “If he’s not too busy,” Eileen added quickly.

  “Honore? He’s the big guy over there.” The man pointed to the far corner where a computer-made HAPPY ST. PATRICK’S DAY banner still hung on the wall.

  “He’s the one below the poster. With USF’s basketball schedule.”

  Mary Helen looked toward the corner where the inspector was pointing. A husky back hunched over an old-fashioned typewriter.

  “Honore! For you,” the man called from the doorway.

  “Yo!” Raising his index finger, the fellow stood up and turned toward them.

  For a moment, Mary Helen was startled. She adjusted her bifocals just to make sure. Why, standing there, Inspector Honore looked, for all the world, just like
a big black Kojak without the hat.

  * * *

  Separately, Kate and Jack drove up in front of their peaked-roofed home on 34th and Geary at exactly the same time.

  When Jack saw her, he circled the block, leaving the parking place in front of the house for Kate. He squeezed into one farther up the hill, almost at 35th. Dripping fog rolling in from the Pacific quickly covered Geary Boulevard like cold steam. In the distance, foghorns bleated.

  “Contrary to popular opinion, chivalry is not dead.” Jack bounded up the green wooden steps and stood behind her.

  Shivering, Kate fumbled to get the key into the dead bolt. “Thanks, pal. First one in turns on the heat.” She pushed open the wooden door.

  Jack threw on the switch for the thermostat. Kate could hear the ancient furnace in the basement thump on. Side by side, they stood in front of the old-fashioned heating grate in the baseboard.

  “Anything new or different?” Jack asked.

  “I took your advice,” Kate said.

  “Now that is new and different! What advice?”

  “I made an appointment with the gynecologist. Actually, today I couldn’t get away from Gallagher long enough to phone, so I stopped by the office on my way home. Do you have any idea how long it takes to get an appointment?”

  “I must admit I don’t.”

  “Six weeks! I can’t get in until June twenty-eighth.” Kate stared at him, waiting for a reaction. When she didn’t get one, she pulled a blue and white pamphlet out of her coat pocket and handed it to Jack. “I picked this up while I was there. It says one thing that causes infertility is stress. We have to do something to lessen our stress.”

  Blasts of hot air rose from the grate, warming Kate’s feet, then shooting up under her skirt to the goose-bumps on her legs and thighs.

  Jack flipped through the pamphlet, then laid it on the hall table. “No big deal!” He hung up his jacket in the closet and stored his gun on the top shelf. “Let’s start by not cooking tonight.”

  Kate suspected it was Jack’s turn to cook.