Gabriel developed the reflections of two souls in the dark room. A4 exposures of the window girl and the dead preacher.
He half-hoped (but didn’t expect) that the strange tattoo-haze over her cheek would be proved benign; a smudge or smear on the glass between them, and not the Trinity tattoo at all.
He slipped them into a manila envelope along with photographs of The Trinity killer’s other victims. The quality of the printouts was grainy, but each one shared the same macabre tattoo on left cheek.
Gabriel went back to the bar on Third Avenue, because he didn’t know where else to go. Stood across the street, camera in hand. Waited for her. Counted the buses going one way in the rush hour traffic and the yellow cabs coming the other. Felt the subway train rumble by beneath the sidewalk and lost count. Watched a red faced Santa Claus rifling the bins for scraps, the neck of a brown baggie-wrapped bottle peering out of a festive pocket.
Someone else was in her seat, holding a copy of the New York Times at a distance to keep the print in focus. Gabriel stole a single shot of the reading man, more to dismiss the doubt that by rights should have been niggling at the back of his mind. After that, he went inside and settled into a comfortable lean against the bar, a slowly settling Guinness and a saucer full of cashew nuts to chew the wait out.
The barroom was mothballed in the cheap gasoline scent that was so essentially New York City.
She came in at lunchtime, just after, ordered an iced lemon tea and nothing else. As she had the day before, the sad faced girl who called herself Celine sat at her window table and stared out at the lamppost across the street, looking for her saviour on the wet sidewalk.
Gabriel slipped the camera out of his pocket and stole a single flashless snap of her profile, left side, before he put it away again; this one for confirmation of the impossible. Ran a hand through his hair and walked across to where she was sat. Squeezed into the booth opposite her and put his hands flat on the table between them. “Can we talk? Someplace private?”
Without looking up, she said: “The booth’s occupied mister.” Her voice was low, rich, like the tremble of the black keys on a piano; and her smell…
…Sweetness; of expensive cologne, rose shampoo and scented bubble bath. Delicate scents fresh from the perfume counter in Bloomingdales.
“You’re Celine, right? Humour me, Celine.” He took a roll of bills from the pocket of his Chinos, rifled them and pulled out three fifty’s. Sliding them across the table, Gabriel stopped an inch short of her long, sculptured fingernails. They were plastic, fake, he noticed, seeing a leaking glue-bubble. “I just want to talk, even if I have to pay the going rate.”
“For Christ’s sake,” she breathed, her accent a slow southern drawl, and fixed him with a long suffering look with about as much warmth in it as a dead caveman frozen in an ice floe. “It ain’t even three-thirty in the afternoon, and I ain’t working this place, no way, no how. So put your fucking money away.”
“Hey, hey. Sorry. Look, this has started all wrong. I’m not looking for a date. I need to talk to you.” Gabriel held out his hands, palms pressed out in a gesture of peace, one bandaged, one bare, shrugged his thickset shoulders. What am I supposed to say? I used to be a cop until I killed my own son…
She looked at him, her ink-stain eyes moving down the lines of his chest, to the lip of the table and back in open appraisal to his face, saw the pain his eyes and misunderstood. “Talk all you like,” she said. “I ain’t promising I’ll listen.”
He could feel the dusky bristling of three-thirty shadow poking through his olive tanned chin. There was no nice way to say what he had to say, so he slid a photograph from the envelope and slid it across the table. “Look at the picture, tell me what you see.”
Celine studied the photo in careful silence. Then said: “A shadow, something. On my cheek. When did you take these?”
“Yesterday… I saw you sat here, thought it was a good picture. I’ve got some other photos. They’re pretty ugly but I want you to look at them, same deal. Tell me what you see, okay?” He put the envelope on the table; let her do it in her own time. Let her make up her own mind.
One by one Celine withdrew the brutal images, laying them out in a macabre fan; the dead faces; the injuries; the Trinity, father, son and bloody ghost carved into each cheek in turn. She looked back at her own photograph. Back at the ghost there, superimposed on her face, looking for the trickery but not finding it. Silence, stunned. Then:
“You think I’m part of this? That I’m going to get hurt? Is that it?”
“Like I said, humour me.” There was just the merest hint of irony in Gabriel’s voice. He’d come so close to saying trust me, and that would have been a mistake, given the circumstances. This girl’s world was being turned upside down by a stranger, asking for her trust while he did it was too much, too soon. Instead he asked: “Have you got friends you can stay with for a couple of days? Somewhere to go?” Safe ground. “Surround yourself by familiar faces; maybe take a few days off from meeting strangers. Give this some time to blow over. It’s probably nothing but… just humour me, okay?”
She nodded mutely, staring at the mess of the padre’s body.
He left his number of his mobile, the number back at the apartment, Mannelli’s number at the Westwood Precinct, and the photographs for her to think about.