‘We go up? See her?’ Geoffrion prompted him. His new Sergeant-Detective, the guy with the gargantuan honker, had drifted off. The question brought him back to earth.
‘I’ll go on my own,’ Cinq-Mars determined. ‘Norville, locate the janitor. Ask if he saw or heard anything – not only last night, but recently. Then work your way through the tenants. Anything suspicious over the last few weeks? Make sure to interrogate the men who strut around in their undershirts. Or no shirts. If they’re showing off how fat they are in public, they might’ve been out on their balconies when something of interest happened.’
‘Got it.’
‘And the son,’ Cinq-Mars added.
‘What son?’
‘The janitor’s. A teenager. Talk to him. When I got here, he was still in bed.’
‘Teenagers. They can sleep through earthquakes.’
‘Cops are crawling through the building and his own apartment – he’s not interested? Can’t rouse himself to crank open an eyelid? People were robbed, Norville. They’re raising a stink. We have squad cars with flashing lights, guns on our belts. It’s a big deal on the block. Bored teenagers are curious. When we show up, they do, too. Why is he the exception?’
‘OK. The janitor, the son, the fat guys. I’m on it.’ He did not seem perturbed to be taking orders from a young man whom a day earlier possessed the same rank as him.
‘Nord, when you’re not busy indoors, be outside at the rear. We’ll find each other that way.’
Nord slipped off his tongue. He didn’t want to call him Not Related: clearly derogatory. And he certainly wasn’t going to call him Poof-Poof. Still, Norville felt too formal. He could address him by his rank, Detective, and forget about it. Nord felt better. A diminutive of his full name which meant North City, or North of the City. So, Nord. North, in French. Familiar, friendly, respectful as nicknames go, one that might work between them.
So far, no objection.
Before he shared a word with the woman on the top floor, Cinq-Mars enumerated a few rising suspicions. This was not in character nor part of his professional process. His choice to be a policeman stemmed from a natural inclination to side with victims, not perpetrators. He found his reaction, then, perplexing.
Concerns cropped up as he climbed the spiral stairs. He spotted something previously missed. Outside a number of kitchen doors, roughly at the height of mid-shin, a pair of vertical chalk marks were etched on the red bricks. Each about three inches long. Having noticed them, he returned back to ground level to start over. This time he noted which apartments were marked and which were not. A connection: only apartments scored with chalk marks were left untouched by the robbery. Any that suffered a break-in remained clear. Possibly, a cop did it, after the fact, although it was not procedure. More likely, the property had been cased in advance. The thieves had scored the dwellings they wanted to avoid by scratching twin chalk marks.
A quick examination showed why.
Each of the marked apartments had either a deadbolt or other serious locks on the backdoor. The apartments could not be entered by creating a hole in the glass then tripping a latch inside. For these apartments, a thief required a key or a modified battering ram. Robbing multiple dwellings at night presented a difficulty: how to quickly differentiate between doors with deadbolts and those without. Chalk marks, etched ahead of time during daylight, made the task easy.
Upstairs, Cinq-Mars took note that the premises occupied by the woman issuing the rape charge had been marked by chalk. Her place had been designated to be left alone. Sure enough, a proper deadbolt protected the premises, nor had the glass in her door been compromised. Her apartment, unlike most, also possessed a screen door secured by a hook-and-eye latch. A frail secondary defense, yet it provided an extra line of security. Before knocking, Cinq-Mars considered that her claim of being violated required close scrutiny – or viewed as a crime not connected to the rampant break-and-entries.
He rapped his knuckles against the doorframe.
No one showed. He pounded his fist three times upon the frame, then politely, twice, on the side window.
A woman emerged. Tentative, distrustful of him from a distance. He showed his badge. She stepped briskly to cross the room, unlocking the inner and outer doors to admit him.
‘So many police. The neighborhood is overrun, like fleas on a blanket. Who knew we hired so many? Our taxes! The entire police department must be out today.’
Cinq-Mars relinquished the urge to correct her. A few squad cars did not constitute a significant police presence.
‘I understand you’ve suffered an assault,’ he said. He let go her reference to cops as fleas.
‘Diabolical,’ she said, and invited him inside.
Moira Ellibee dwelled in the apartment alone. She spoke softly and dabbed an occasional tear while seated in a kitchen chair, her brow furrowed into tight knots. Cinq-Mars sat facing her. He discerned that a daintiness, a kind of overt vulnerability, encompassed the woman in a protective cloak. He suppressed an urge to declare himself her protector – he knew better, but also because he harbored a suspicion. As the conversation continued, he had to build defenses to thwart her. Not that she was hostile. The contrary, she was so inviting, and so vulnerable, and so fragile in demeanor that he could easily lose his professional distance and act to shelter and comfort her. Every intuitive signal brayed against that response.
Of average height, the woman was thin. Late forties, early fifties. Mousy hair of medium length with gentle curls. She kept one knee crossed over the other. She repeatedly burrowed in the pockets of her flimsy house gown as if seeking a recalcitrant Kleenex, finding none. ‘Thanking my lucky stars,’ she said, in a voice that sounded grateful before Cinq-Mars could process what she meant. ‘He wanted me to only use my mouth.’
He paused to deflect his momentary shock. ‘Can you describe him, ma’am?’
‘How can I? He wore a ski mask. What do you call those? Don’t tell me. I think I know.’
‘A balaclava?’
‘Don’t tell me, I said! Oh, you’re wicked!’
Difficult to assess this woman’s bearing. ‘Was he tall, ma’am? Short? Stout? Skinny?’
‘Muscular. The stomach muscles on that fellow. I closed my eyes for the rest.’
‘A harrowing experience.’ She didn’t appear to be in critical distress, her upset under control.
‘Are you Catholic?’ she inquired.
‘Sorry?’ Not a welcome question. He was Roman Catholic, and practicing, although of late he hadn’t given his faith much attention. That had been bothering him, as if his career was stripping away his internal fortitude one speck at a time. He wasn’t calling it a crisis of faith, yet he could see where he might wake up one morning and discover that his spiritual life – vital to his sense of self – was slipping away to become a distant memory.
‘It’s important to know.’
‘Why’s that, ma’am?’
‘Because of what I need to tell you,’ she intimated.
‘I’m Catholic, yes.’ That he once intended to be a priest he kept to himself.
‘Do you attend mass?’
‘When I can.’ Not strictly true. Lately, he’d been skipping. ‘Why do you ask?’
She leaned closer. He noticed the veins in her temples, a translucency to her skin.
‘It’s all right,’ she whispered. ‘I cannot be harmed. His …’ She stopped to hunt for the right word. ‘His goop was never released. Do you know why?’
He couldn’t believe the conversation. Her tone seemed off-kilter. Or off the planet. ‘I don’t. Why was that?’
‘I’m protected. By the Virgin. Mary keeps me safe.’
She leaned closer still. The entwined fingers of both her hands hovered above his knees. Her head slumped below his own. She spoke so quietly that he had to lean closer to her. Their foreheads nearly touched.
‘She appeared to me, the Virgin,’ she whispered. ‘When I was young. She gave to me, as you can see, the body of a sixteen-year-old. Mine forever. My body doesn’t age, Detective. It’s important to me that you’re a Catholic man, a believer, or you won’t understand. Protestants think I’m crazy. But I can tell. You’re a Catholic man. You know how to believe.’
He straightened in his hardback chair. She was clearly nuts, but that did not mean she had not been violated.
‘Did he enter by the kitchen door, ma’am? Or the front? Or through a window?’
She sat back herself. She appeared frustrated with explanations. ‘How am I supposed to know? He appeared. Just like that. In my bedroom.’
‘Did he leave by the kitchen door, then, or the front stairwell?’
‘I didn’t show him out, my detective. I was too stunned. Only when the police arrived outside did I dare leave my bedroom. You understand. He might have been waiting for me beyond the door.’
He thought to ask how she knew the police had arrived if she was in her bedroom. Hers did not look out to the street. He let his challenge pass, then stood, largely to re-establish his position as an investigating detective and to escape the role she imposed upon him as her confidant.
‘This occurred, then, in the middle of the night? Are you aware of the robberies in the building, Ms Ellibee? Do you think your attacker was also here to rob you?’
‘I checked. Looked everywhere. I’m not missing anything. As I said, I’m protected.’
‘By the Virgin. Yes. Ma’am, do you require medical attention? We can take you to the hospital.’
‘They never believe me, the doctors.’
‘Never? You could talk to a nurse—’
‘They’re worse.’
‘Have you been raped before?’ Finding where her sense of reality began and vanished was proving difficult. Perhaps impossible.
‘Raped? I wasn’t raped, my detective. I was visited by a specter, a phantom, a ghost. They don’t have the power to rape me. They’re not physical, Detective. They don’t have bodies. They have no goop. Although his muscles, as I said, they felt very real, and I was violated – I think I can put it that way – on the spiritual realm. It’s difficult to tell the difference when it feels that real. I guess there’s no big difference. Anyway, I told you, I’m protected. By the Virgin. I suppose where the phantom lives, in his world, you can call it rape and not be wrong. I will let you say it, if you wish, as long as you understand that ghosts or phantoms cannot hurt me. Did you think they could? Really? They cannot. I’m protected that way.’
Cinq-Mars took a breath. The help she required was not of a sort he could provide.
She went on: ‘I told that wonderful policeman about my visitor, my detective. He seemed to like my story. He seemed a nice young man. I didn’t tell him I was raped, of course. I have no interest in being raped. I don’t want that going around the block. I only had to open my mouth for someone who was not there. You understand, my detective. Being Catholic.’
Cinq-Mars held in abeyance the notion that the specter with the muscular build and ripped stomach might well have matched her impression of the uniform who interviewed her. One image may have blurred with another. One body imagined from another. He’d have to tell Detective Casgrain, who had mentioned an apartment building of crazies, that he didn’t know the half. Casgrain may not have wanted to give up the case to Cinq-Mars, but Cinq-Mars was now more than willing to hand it back.
‘Thank you, ma’am, for your cooperation,’ he said.
‘I fibbed,’ she told him. The corners of her lips turned up.
‘How so?’ Really? She’d been having him on?
Moira Ellibee pressed her thumb and forefinger together to express an infinitesimal space. ‘A teensy white lie.’
‘I see.’
‘The Virgin Mary didn’t permanently give me the body of a sixteen-year old.’
‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t think so.’
‘Thank you. Sometimes people don’t believe me. I cheated a little.’
‘Ma’am—’
‘I’m fourteen. Physically. Below the neck. That’s my age. Fourteen-and-a-half. That’s when she visited me. The Virgin. I was fourteen. My body hasn’t changed since. It’s permanent.’
‘That’s … wonderful. Thank you, Ms Ellibee. We’ll be in touch.’
‘Call me Moira.’
Cinq-Mars declined to do so.
‘Is that nice young policeman coming back?’
‘I can’t be sure, ma’am.’
‘Will you be coming back?’
Cinq-Mars shuffled out the door, somewhat awkwardly.