Blind Sight

by Carol O'Connell

  If love could make a sound—

  A wind was coming his way, almost here. It was in the noise of a zillion leaves slapped together, clapping in waves of applause. Lots of trees. But no close neighbors? There were no barking dogs or shouts of children, and no singsong voices of women calling them indoors. Only occasionally did he hear a car passing by, a far-off motor on a distant road.

  Jonah’s hair was blown back as a warm scent of flowers washed over him. He would never believe that this garden was made by a monster. Some woman must have planted these roses. Where was she now?

  I think you know, said Aunt Angie.

  8

  The archaic autopsy bay was the only one to survive modern-day renovations. Though it had not seen any human remains for more than half a century, it was intact, all its original furnishings and tools kept as historical mementos. Anticipating a special delivery, the chief medical examiner had selected this small room for privacy and secrecy.

  “Gallbladders?” Dr. Edward Slope had found a snag in the paperwork for chain of custody. He removed four plastic-wrapped human hearts from a carrier cooled with dry ice. Still awaiting his explanation, he said, “Gallbladders!”

  Detective Riker shrugged. “When I saw the Coast Guard bulletin, all it said was medical waste washed up on the beach. So I called and told ’em I was in the market for somethin’ like that. They only asked how many body parts. I said four, and that’s what they gave me. I signed off on gallbladders, so what? Those guys don’t know hearts from hamburgers.”

  “And what about the labeling?” Each organ’s wrapping was clearly marked with the words, proof of death. “The Coast Guard didn’t find that . . . odd?”

  “Well, they might think that was normal—for an animal-testing facility.” Perhaps sensing that this falsification of documents was not going over well, the detective said, “Hey, nobody gives a shit about chain of custody. All I’m lookin’ for here is containment. No media leaks.” Riker did a slow revolve to admire his surroundings. “This’ll do just fine.”

  The antique dissection table lacked even the sophistication of a suspended microphone, and Dr. Slope spoke to a conventional tape recorder, correcting the misidentification of organs. Scalpel in hand, he bent down to his work, cutting open the thick plastic that sealed each heart. “Excellent preservation of tissue.”

  The detective, lacking enthusiasm for the bloodier, smellier side of his job, faced a glass case at the rear wall and pretended an interest in the ancient instruments on display.

  Done with recorded observations, the doctor consulted his autopsy photos, four close shots of severed vestiges inside heartless corpses. “You don’t need to stick around for the tissue match. I’m dead sure these organs belong to your victims. . . . So where’s your partner today?”

  “I think Mallory went to church,” said Riker, as if that might sound reasonable to anyone who knew her.

  —

  THE CHURCH OF ST. JUDE was small, though not modest. Tall filigreed spires aimed for heaven, but fell far short of it, and the flying buttresses that flanked the structure were a bit of architectural overkill, hardly necessary to support walls that did not tower. The buttresses had the look of stone legs bent at the knees, as if the church meant to rise up on tiptoe aspirations of becoming a cathedral.

  Father Brenner’s parish was not one that any ambitious churchman would take any notice of. Thus, he understood why the young detective felt that Father DuPont had been slumming when he had selected a simple priest, one closer to the streets, to go—cop shopping, as she had put it.

  Kathy Mallory sat beside him in the first pew, staring at the great stained-glass window beyond the altar, an outsized wonder too grand for this space. While tipping back sherry one night, a parishioner, whose trade was interior design, had let slip a term for such a display—Piss Elegant—along the lines of a chandelier to light a closet. Father Brenner looked up to the vaulted ceiling and gaudy flights of angels painted there with insufficient room to fly. Sometimes, in Kathy’s presence, he felt the need to apologize even for things beyond his control.

  Her reason for today’s visit was tattoos, though she would not elaborate beyond her need for a small, manageable venue to catch a particular mourner, one who might lead her to the lost boy.

  Good enough.

  Priest and detective had resolved the matter of the nun’s mass being held here instead of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the first choice of Father DuPont, whose conduct and character she held in reproach.

  “He went to the mayor first,” she said. “He wanted something buried.”

  “No, he didn’t want to hide anything,” said Father Brenner. “Quite the opposite. He wanted Sister Michael found. But it was his feeling that the mayor and the police wouldn’t be of much help. He came to me because I’ve known him since he was a boy,” though not an altar boy. It had come as a surprise when he was asked to write a seminary reference for a much younger DuPont, no one’s idea of a candidate for the priesthood. “He trusted me to find someone . . . like you. Incidentally, he complimented me on my excellent choice. Let’s see. How did he put it? Oh, yes. You beat the crap out of one of your superiors. Chief Goddard? I believe Father DuPont is a bit in awe of you.”

  “You told me the mayor knew the nun was missing before the report was filed. But he heard it from DuPont. You left that part out. You tricked me.”

  On the contrary, he knew this for a trick of hers. Rather than ask a straight question to clarify matters, she would always shoot first and then determine truth or falsehood in the screams of denial from the wounded. And he must admit that this had always been hideously effective.

  “No trick,” he said. “Father DuPont told me there was something in the mayor’s attitude. Without putting it into actual words, Mayor Polk managed to convey that he already knew Sister Michael was missing, and that he . . . had it covered.”

  “You’re telling me that priest does a good cold read on people. That’s in the skill set of a hustler, a con artist, a pimp, a pedophile— just stop me when I’m getting warm, okay?”

  Ah, obviously they had come to the real reason for this visit.

  “Tell me, Father,” she said, she commanded, “Where does DuPont hang out, when he’s not running errands . . . like taking out the cardinal’s trash?”

  —

  IT TOOK TIME to be blind.

  At first, this new room was sketchy. There was only this straight-back chair. The smooth tabletop. And the man.

  Then came the hum and ping of a microwave oven. A clatter of plates. The slam of a cupboard door. Chair legs sliding on the floor. Pizza. It smelled good, and Jonah’s fingers found the slice on the plate in front of him. The man was eating. Teeth gnashing. The dog’s jaws-open breathing walked under the table. A wheeze whistled up from the lungs. Was this a sick dog or an old one?

  Pop. Fizz. The smell of beer.

  Cigarette Man’s voice had the mushy sound of a mouth full of food when he asked, “What’s the worst thing about bein’ blind?”

  Jonah had a stockpile of smartass comebacks for that one, but he swallowed them all, and he said to the man, “Shins and knees.” He crooked one leg into his chest and rolled up his jeans to expose a shinbone. “This is my best scar.” He ran one finger over a raised welt. “Four inches long, thirty-six stitches. . . . It happened at a friend’s house when I was nine. I tripped over a footstool and ended up breaking a glass coffee table. After my first visit, I thought I’d know where everything was. But Lucinda’s mom moves the furniture around all the time.”

  “It’s a great scar, kid.”

  “I like it.”

  “So, after you got stitched up—that lady—did she stop movin’ stuff around?”

  “No, she still does that,” said Jonah. “We are who we are.”

  The man was chewing again. Somewhere behind Jonah’s chair, a clock ticked off
passing seconds. Minutes. He rocked his body—just a little, a calming thing, a leftover habit of baby days. Waiting. Tensing. What was going on with Cigarette Man inside this emptiness of no words?

  The boy turned toward the breeze of a window left open and the smell of flowers from the backyard. “Big garden out there, huh? I bet those rose bushes cost a pile of money.”

  All he got back from the man was the sound of a plate being pushed to one side. The click of the lighter. Smoke. Then nothing. So quiet. Too quiet.

  “My aunt grew roses, but she started with seeds.” Jonah had been her accomplice in the October harvests. “I was her bag man,” when they had gone into city parks, seeking the bushes that had not been cut back, and every overlooked stem with a ripe ball of seeds had been the treasure of these hunts. Later, in the after-dinner hours at his grandmother’s kitchen table, those balls were cut open and the seeds plucked out. “My job was cleaning off the hairy fuzz so we could soak them overnight. The floaters got trashed and the sinkers were keepers.” The next night, the keepers were cleaned again with old toothbrushes. “If you don’t get all the pulp off, they get moldy.” After being rolled in wet paper towels that reeked of peroxide, the seeds were bagged and kept in Granny’s refrigerator for a long time. “For months and months. Then we planted them in egg cartons full of dirt.”

  Jonah fell silent. The low whistle of lungs told him the dog was asleep beneath the table. Cigarette Man was still in his chair, but had he been listening? Did the man even care where rosebushes came from? What was he—

  A grunt from the other side of the table was an invitation to keep talking.

  “So . . . maybe a month and a half went by before they sprouted,” and when they were a few inches tall, their next home was in tiny pots. They had filled up steps on the fire escape and the outsides of windowsills. “They need direct sunlight.” Lots of time had passed before they earned bigger pots, and more time before the first yield of rosebuds. “My aunt said they’re like children. Not exact copies of the ones they came from,” and a rose made this way was a long, patient wait of loving care. “It’s a lot of work.”

  And Cigarette Man said, “Yeah, it is,” like he already knew how roses were born.

  His garden had not been bought by the bush.

  No, said Aunt Angie, he watched me work at this table. I sat in the chair where you’re sitting now.

  —

  THE SMALL LOWER EAST SIDE hole-in-the-wall was a neighborhood restaurant with late hours and a liquor license. This was a priest’s version of a cop bar. A number of tables and bar stools were occupied by men with notched clerical collars.

  Father DuPont sat with a layman, a member of the city council, who would not be the first politician to hold court at this time of night with a foaming beer stein in one hand. The priest drank from a wineglass, and he was the better-dressed politico.

  Detective Mallory and her partner loomed over the table and held up their badges. Councilman Adler’s eyes popped, and his conclusions were easy to guess. Years ago, this was the way cops had made the public arrests of the pedophile priests, and now Adler was afraid that reporters were lurking nearby, waiting for a staged photo opportunity that would end his career.

  The councilman could not distance himself fast enough, tossing money on the table and bidding DuPont a good night with the lying tagline, “I’ll call you,” the kiss-off to whatever business they had in the works.

  With no invitation, Mallory sat down in the vacated chair. In lieu of hello, she said, “A monastery’s a good hiding place. Who was the nun afraid of?”

  “Afraid?” The priest shook his head. “Angie wasn’t—”

  “Angie?” Riker settled into the chair next to his partner. “Not Sister Michael? So you knew that girl when she was still workin’ the streets.”

  Mallory held up the mug shot of a teenage Angela Quill. “Was that her first arrest for prostitution?” She watched DuPont’s eyes drift to the side. Was he tossing a coin in his mind, heads for truth, tails for a lie?

  “No,” said the priest. “The first time, the arresting officer knew her family situation. He’d chased her down before for truancy. So when he caught her soliciting, he brought her to me instead of the police station. She was a child, only thirteen years old.”

  “And the cop brought her to you,” said Riker, faking incredulity. “You like ’em young, Father?”

  DuPont should have shown some outrage here, but he let the accusation slide past him. “My degrees are in psychology. Back then, I was interning at a local clinic, counseling runaways—and she wasn’t the first child prostitute to walk in the door. Angie told me she needed the money to keep her nephew in day care while she was at school. She didn’t trust her mother to watch the baby. Well, hooking for day care. I’d never heard that one before. . . . But then I met her mother. No one would leave an infant with a monster like Mrs. Quill.”

  “Here’s the problem.” Riker flipped through a small spiral notebook. “It’s what you left out.” He found a page he liked. “Here we go. Your internship was attached to Social Services. That made you Angie’s therapist and her caseworker. One call from you and those kids could’ve gone into foster care.”

  “I’ve made that mistake before. There are uglier fates for foster kids than life with Mrs. Quill. So I found Angie an after-school job to keep her off the street. And I got her nephew into a day-care center. It was in the basement of a local church. I think that’s where she became infatuated with nuns.”

  “But Angie kept working the streets, turning tricks,” said Riker. “Two jobs. Busy little kid.”

  Mallory liked the stunned look on the priest’s face. He must be wondering how many answers the cops already had before their questions were asked—and might lies be a bad option here?

  Wondering done, the priest said, “Yes, family came first with Angie. She had a little plan to get her brother through a computer-science course.” He stared at the mug shot on the table. “I didn’t know she was still selling herself, not till I posted bail for that arrest.”

  “But that wasn’t her last time out as a hooker.” Mallory laid down the autopsy photo of the nun’s naked thighs. “Check out the tattoos. She didn’t have them when she was booked. You’ve already seen them, right? The pictures at the station house? And maybe you saw them before that? Do you like red roses, Father? Are they your favorites?”

  —

  “YEAH, YEAH.” Cigarette Man had soured on the topic of roses. “What about dreams? You gotta see somethin,’ or what’s a dream for?”

  “The blind can see in dreams, but only if they had years of sight before they lost it. That’s not me,” said Jonah. “I was born this way, and I can’t even tell day from night, not with my eyes. Some can. I can’t.”

  “But when you’re asleep—”

  “I dream voices, other sounds.” And there was a sense of place, even when he was dreaming of a plane in flight or being on a train to somewhere else. His dreams came booted up with maps inside his head. No need of a cane. “I smell things in dreams, touch them. And people touch me. The feel of—”

  “Naw, you can’t feel nothin’ in a dream. It’s like watchin’ a movie.”

  “You only think that because the picture’s all you remember when you wake up.” Aunt Angie had once believed in that movie idea. She had no memory of touching anything in her sleep—or of anything touching her, not before Jonah had told her about his Granny dreams of pinches and worse things. After that talk, his aunt had discovered that her own dreams could hurt, and that had made him sorry for telling her his nightmares.

  “Sometimes,” said Jonah, “when you’re asleep . . . you feel pain. Things can get you.”

  “That’s nuts. I never got hurt in no dream.”

  Maybe you will tonight.

  —

  THE PRIEST would not look at the photograph of the nun’s ta
ttoos.

  Mallory held it up in front of his face. “You don’t think they’re beautiful, Father? Our medical examiner does. His theory? She fell in love. The ME’s seen a million tattoos. Hate and love are big themes on his dissection tables. We’re looking for one of her johns, a freak with a thing for roses. Now, how bad do you want us to find that little boy?”

  Father DuPont lowered his eyes and spoke to his wineglass. “I don’t know how many men she— Angie was a prostitute till her brother finished school and got a decent job. Then she rented an apartment. Home and a job, that was the criteria for Child Protective Services. Without that, they’d never get the little boy away from Mrs. Quill. Once Harry got custody . . . well, then it was Angie’s turn to have a life. She became a nun.”

  Another lie. She knew Harold Quill’s first job would not have supported an apartment and a child. Angie had been the breadwinner for two more years before joining up with the nuns. “I checked out the website for her monastery. Angie didn’t have the qualifications to—”

  “No, they prefer a college background, and Angie didn’t even finish high school. But the monastery’s prioress was satisfied with the interview. And I provided references from very influential—”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Riker. “You politicked a hooker into a nunnery?”

  “Detective, you overestimate me.” The priest drained his wineglass and raised one hand to signal the waiter for another. “Monastic nuns are hardly swayed by church politics. Angie sold her body on the street to protect a child. And the prioress didn’t see this as a contradiction to the girl’s religious calling.”

  That shut Riker down for the moment.

  Mallory was less impressed by the wisdom and compassion of some old prioress, a jumped-up nun. And she read the priest as a player. “You’re not one of the banking DuPonts. You didn’t come down from socialites. Your family wasn’t even middle-class. Do you bother to mention that to your superiors . . . while they’re moving you up the church ladder?”