One of the two patrolmen standing in front of 1143 Lexington flagged them down as they approached.
Closing the Black Hawk’s door behind him, Mannelli called to the uniform: “Where’s Stern?”
“Up on the third, Lieutenant,” the officer answered, falling back into position beside his partner as they went through the open door.
The door to the third floor studio stood open, letting the bad air circulate. Gabriel breathed deeply, as if trying to smell any traces the murderer might have left behind; the stench of his rotten soul clinging to the grease and the fat in the frying pans. The floor was covered by cracked linoleum, the checkerboard pattern broken up by missing tiles and the gap-toothed grin of the floorboards beneath. A grubby kitchenette stacked with rotten food and the chitinous sound of hatching maggots ran the length of the room. Next to an open window was a bed, its fittings tarnished brass, and a chipboard chest of drawers. Not many possessions to mark the passing of a life.
Inside the room, Gabriel’s guess about the bad air confirmed itself.
The body of a white man, naked but for a pair of black stockings, suspenders and patent leather heels, stretched flat on his stomach, lay on the sagging mattress. His pallid face was set at right angles to his shoulders; his sightless — half-eaten — eyes still open on death. The blood had drained away to his legs, leaving a stark blue discoloration around the base of his spine. An elaborate series of cuts in the dead flesh made the body and arms of a crucifix. Suspended from each arm, the cups of a scale, weighing out sins and atonement. A single large cut opened him from balls to throat, splitting the image neatly in two.
The neck of a broken wine bottle lay on the floor, clotted blood clinging to its jagged edges.
The dead man’s face was all he needed to see the final mercy death had been when it finally claimed him; set as it was in a cruel sculpture of agony forever recorded by the hand of rigor mortis.
Bill Stern, Costello to Mannelli’s Abbot, was standing over the body, a thick Cuban cigar jutting out of the corner of his dour mouth. Stern’s face was deeply seamed and pitted with the crags and craters of acne from twenty five years ago. “Good to see ya, Gabe. Danny. Not a pretty picture is it?” He grumbled, every other word punctuated by a wispy puffball of smoke.
Gabriel moved over to the window and stared out at the stark stretch of the Manhattan skyline. The rain might have stopped for the morning, but the sky over the city was slashed with streaks of silver, grey and white; the sky a backdrop to a latticework of cold, rippling clouds and the fading outline of a werewolf moon.
Using the hard edge of a fingernail, Gabriel traced the outline of two simplistic shapes carved into the wooden sill. A tadpole and a crude frog. Old magic… The metamorphosis from water to earth… He shook his head, thinking of his father’s tales of the Old Man who defeated the terrible underwater enemies of mankind. The perpetual war between the sky and the water spirits. Salt had been powdered into the opened grains of the wood. Next to white man wardings… This was one scared man.
He scratched the tattooed relic on his chest, looking for inspiration.
Great Spirit, help me, he thought bitterly and said: “Hey Dan, something over here you ought to see.”
Forensics took photos of the warding from above and from either side while he explained its significance. The clash of cultures and superstitions. Stern grunted, making notes in his pad, then thumbed over a page and scrawled: SALVATION DAMNATION TRINITY as if the words themselves were. “Wait ‘til you get a load of this, though. Shirley Bassey here’s the priest from St. Malachi's. Don’t seem to me like a man of God would be messin’ with your Voodoo, Gabe. No matter how scared he was.”
Gabriel’s fingers strayed back to his chest, seeking the comfort of the raven. He didn’t argue, simply slipped the camera from his pocket and took three quick shots of the crime scene. He knew the superstitions and the hexes as well as he knew the scent of rain. You can take the man out of the Reservation, but you can’t take the Indian from his soul, and that was the bitterest irony because that was exactly what he’d done, playing along with their dirty White Man magic, sacrificing the Great Spirit to the four winds. My world has moved on, he told himself, knowing it sounded like the lame excuse it was. There’s no place for the old ways in my life, no place… His fingers scratched almost angrily at the tattoo, denying the lie of his thoughts.
“You sure about that, Bill?”
“Yeah, had a run in with him three years back. Same night Al Culpepper was shot. The padre here gave last rites after…” After that doped-up speed freak put a slug through his head. Killed in a fuckin’ church, killed in the fuckin’ arms of God… Stern sucked on his cigar, let out a shaky breath. Didn’t say any of that out loud.
Gabriel moved over to the body, laying his hand palm flat on the clammy skin. His fingers stopped moving as they touched the ugly Trinity tattoo, his thoughts blind men suddenly cursed with the gift of sight. Suddenly, touching the dead man was like feeling the fangs of an electric serpent sinking into his fingertips, the venomous contact burning up through his arm, the violently discharged voltage sending him reeling as —
The boy rose from his knees, looking bewildered, blank… His Latino lips moved, suddenly hungry to taste the fresh air… He was circled by the black-eyed gaze of guns… the smoke curling from the votive candles, a lazy lover done dying for them… and then the silent screams and the not-so-silent curses as the boy’s body was suddenly forced into a twisting, jerking dance by their bullets… spinning, arms drowning and dying as his body crashed into the stone altar… Up above, the crucifix… Wearing its crown of thorns… Drifting down, breathing its sickness into the boy… and the boy rising again… reaching out to touch his cheek, a fingernail burning its scar into his face while the stained window wept its tears of broken glass…
— the light bulb hanging from the bare flex shattered, raining hot glass on his scalp and the dead padre’s rumpled sheets. Gabriel recoiled involuntarily, hands flying up, crushing the heels of his palms against his temples, face twisting in a mask of agony.
“Get… out… of… my… head…” The words hissed between clenched teeth even as he started to collapse. His legs buckled and he hit the floor, head clipping off the side of the bed with a sickening crunch.
Mannelli reacted first, making a grab for thin air as Gabriel slipped through his fingers.
Face a mask of concern, he knelt down beside Rush, “You okay, Gabe?” He reached out, touched his forehead.
Gabriel’s eyelids fluttered, reacting to the sounds, the intrusion of light, bringing him back. His fingers touched the gash left by the bed’s edge, tentatively feeling out the wound. The scar on his left cheek throbbed. Sickness knifed his stomach, but that was all. It came and it went. He blew out a pained breath. A ragged sigh. “I’m not feeling so good; this whole place is spinning…” He bit back the urge to tell Mannelli, to explain, how his world was turning itself upside down.
Mannelli helped him to his feet, supported him. “You’ve got to lay off the Peace Pipe,” his friend joked, the hardened cop again, trying to make light of Gabriel’s sudden collapse. “I suppose it’s too much to ask, but I don’t suppose there were any witnesses were there Bill?”
“The old lady downstairs reported it. Found him like this when she came up to give him his early morning wake-up call. Seems she used to get the padre up at four every morning so he could go down in time to deliver the morning Mass.”
“Now there’s devotion for you, four every morning, huh?”
“Yep. Anyways, the doc’s in with her right now, treating her for shock. Poor old cow’s gonna be on Prozac ‘til she croaks, but as far as I can tell, she didn’t see shit.”
“Sure is getting to be repetitive, ain’t it?”
“You think?”
“How long’s he been like this?” Mannelli nodded downwards, eyes straying back to the grey putty beneath the suspenders.
“About eighteen hours, give or take. We’ll have to wait for the Morgue to give us anything more precise. If it’s another one of The Trinity’s and not some other freak out for a good time, this takes him on to four hookers, two cops, a college kid, a city girl and a transvestite preacher. Can’t make up my mind if he is moving up or down in the world.”
“Too fucking funny, Bill. Cover the padre up, will ya?”