Buck Curtin was smoking one of Willow’s cigarettes and peering quizzically at his cup of coffee. Willow said, “What’s your problem?”
Curtin said, “That stuff tastes like fucking sheep-dip!”
Willow said, “Okay, so dip a fucking sheep in it.” They didn’t like each other, the chemistry was sour. There was grudging mutual respect, something remotely akin to that existent between rattlesnakes and roadrunners, but that was as good as it was ever going to get. Curtin said, “It’s time to talk.”
Willow said, “All right, you be a walrus and I’ll be a carpenter—how’s that for role casting?”
Curtin said, “Not bad. You build a box you can’t get out of, and I’ll label it ‘accessory after the fact.’”
Willow tasted his coffee and shuddered. Curtin was right—it was atrocious.
Curtin raised a chairman-of-the-board forefinger. “Today’s subject will be nuns.”
Willow said, “Great! You discuss nuns and I’ll listen.”
Curtin leaned back on the couch, obviously jaded. His tone was patient but firm. “Look, Willow, yesterday my wife blew three thousand dollars on a new living-room set, this morning my German Shepherd nailed my next-door neighbor in the testicles, I blew a tire on my way to work, I got an ingrown toenail, and I ain’t been laid in six weeks, so I ain’t in the market for your Little-Bo-Peep routine—now you can talk to me here or you can talk to me downtown, but one way or the other you are sure as hell gonna talk to me! C’mon, Willow, make it easy on both of us—whaddaya say?”
Willow shrugged. “Ask and ye shall receive.”
Curtin gave him an affable swat on the shoulder. “That’s more like it! I’m interested in a nun named Sister Rosetta. You’ve been seen with her a couple times and you’ve gone up and down North Austin Boulevard looking for her. What’s the score?”
“Be specific.”
“Where is this Sister Rosetta?”
“She used to live at 5031 North Austin Boulevard. To the best of my knowledge she hasn’t been there in something like a week.”
“I didn’t ask you where she used to be, I asked you where she is.”
“I don’t have the foggiest fucking notion.”
“All right, who is she?”
“She’s the aunt of a young lady I know.”
“Uh-huh—you’re talking about the Hornsby quiff?”
“Yeah, the Hornsby quiff.”
“How did you meet her?”
“The Hornsby quiff?”
“No, the nun—what’s your connection with her?”
“She hired me.”
“To do what?”
“To locate the Hornsby quiff.”
“Why?”
“Sister Rosetta had lost track of her and she was concerned.”
“And you found her?”
“Obviously.”
“How?”
“I went to Sam Brumshaw’s modeling agency—she’d worked for Brumshaw earlier.”
“How come Sister Rosetta didn’t think of going to Brumshaw?”
“I think she did, eventually.”
Curtin nodded. “So do I. What parish is Sister Rosetta out of?”
“She’s out of all of ’em. She’s been disbarred or court-martialed or defrocked or whatever it is they do to nuns.”
“What was the rap?”
“Drinking on the job, drinking off the job, threatening to shoot a bishop—never a dull moment.”
“But she still wears a nun’s habit.”
“That’s because she thinks she’s still a nun.”
“She’s wacko?”
“What’s ‘wacko’? You think you’re Ellery Queen, I think I’m Philo Vance.”
“When did you see her last?”
“Couple Tuesdays ago, about noon.”
“Where?”
“Raponi’s Old Naples Spaghetti House. You’ve been there.”
“What was the occasion? Why was she at Raponi’s?”
“No particular occasion. She just dropped in to tell me that she’d hired a new private detective.”
“One of you bastards wasn’t enough?”
“The new one replaced me. I’d resigned from the case.”
“What was this shamus supposed to do? You’d already located the girl.”
“Yes, but Sister Rosetta didn’t know that.”
“Why not?”
“Probably because I didn’t tell her.”
“Why didn’t you tell her?”
“Because the girl asked me not to.”
“But you took Sister Rosetta’s money.”
“I took it but I returned it.”
“How much money?”
“What’s the difference? Four hundred dollars.”
“The Hornsby chick sure chewed you up in a hurry.”
“She chewed me up in a hurry eight years ago.”
“You’ve been humping that cream puff for eight years?”
“Until I found her I hadn’t seen her in eight years.”
“Anything unusual happen the last time you saw Sister Rosetta?”
“Nothing except she blew Raponi’s dining-room chandelier off the ceiling.”
“How did that happen?”
“Accident.”
“She was armed?”
“To the teeth.”
“With what?”
“A gun, as I recall.”
“Let’s have it, Willow! What kind of gun?”
“A Heffernan-Reese .38.”
Curtin slammed the top of Willow’s coffee table with the palm of a beefy hand. “Well, all right!”
“What’s all right about it? She may have killed two men with that sonofabitch!”
Curtin’s smile was sly. “Well, of course, she did! You saw her drop Raponi’s chandelier?”
“She smoked my eyebrows.”
Curtin drove a fist into the palm of his hand. “God damn! I’m gonna throw a team into Raponi’s joint! If I can come up with that slug, ballistics can nail this thing down.” He took a belt of his coffee and made a face. “A lawyer named Leon Mattfeld spotted a nun on the second floor of the Walton Building on the morning Brumshaw was scragged! A neighborhood woman saw a nun leave Millie and Jake’s parking lot about the time Orlando was shot. Sister Rosetta has the right caliber weapon and she had opportunities in both cases.”
“If it was Sister Rosetta.”
“Don’t blow smoke up my ass, Willow! Who else would it be?”
“Saint Catherine of Ricci?”
Curtin was grinning like a baboon in a banana tree. “I ain’t much on coincidences! A ninety-year-old virgin, there’s a coincidence!”
“Or a very homely virgin.”
“It’s Sister Rosetta, you can take that to the bank—she fits!”
“Sure, she fits, but can you ice her?”
“Not yet—I’ll need that slug and Sister Rosetta’s gun.”
“Also Sister Rosetta and a pair of motives.”
“Crap! One motive! Two murders but one motive—there’s a link here, Willow, and it’s your playmate! Ten gets you twenty if this whole damn business don’t revolve around Gladys Hornsby!”
“How?”
“Well, maybe the Hornsby kid was raped by these characters or maybe they were blackmailing her or maybe any goddamn number of things. Maybe Sister Rosetta just don’t approve of the company her niece keeps—it that’s the case, you should watch your ass on account of you ain’t exactly a knight in shining armor.”
Willow shrugged. “Okay, Curtin, you find Sister Rosetta and you ask her all about it, if she doesn’t blow your head off before you get to the question mark.”
Curtin heaved himself to his feet and Willow said, “By the way, those cigarettes are mine.”
Curtin said, “Yeah, that’s right—I got my mind on other things.” He lit one of Willow’s cigarettes and dropped the pack onto the coffee table. “One more question.”
Willow brushed away a yawn. “Yeah?”
“What’s the name of that old centipede downstairs?”
“Strotman—Martha Strotman.”
“She gallops around naked all the time?”
“Not up here, she doesn’t!”
“Got her phone number?”
“No, but she’s in the book. Why?”
Curtin opened the door and winked. “Like you say, some got it and some don’t.”
“Aw, c’mon, Curtin, hard-up is one thing but oh, my God!”
Curtin blew Willow a kiss.
Willow gave Curtin the finger, locked the door, washed the coffeecups, and went back to bed. Buck Curtin was closing—slowly, but with the grinding certainty of a glacier. He’d sniffed out more than half of it, and when he tumbled to the Wow-Wee Calendar business he’d be in the driver’s seat. Curtin wasn’t a flashy cop, he didn’t possess the sprinter’s early speed, and he wasn’t a spectacular stretch-runner, but you could be sure that he was back there somewhere, poking through the rubble and combing the ashes, and you could bet your last cigar that he’d be along eventually, bearing somebody’s ass on his pike. When Chicago Homicide ran into a tough one, it was always Buck Curtin who came out of the bullpen to wrap it up.
Curtin hadn’t mentioned Casey Bucknell, and he wouldn’t—not until he’d processed Bucknell through his logic apparatus. Curtin rarely discussed anything until he was reasonably certain of its place in the scenario. He’d held back on Sister Rosetta and he’d hold back on Bucknell until his exact equational value could be determined. But what if Curtin dug up every inch of it—Gladys’s party-girl antics, the Wow-Wee photographs, the half-million in Bucknell’s will, the blackmail, the whole seamy shot? Gladys Hornsby didn’t give a damn now, and neither did Tuthill C. Willow. Curtin would pitch Sister Rosetta’s ass into the nearest booby hatch and the circus could toddle on down the road. Willow stretched and drowsed with a warm feeling of well-being, glad that it was behind him, focusing on the possibility of moving in with Gladys Hornsby. He wondered if Gladys could cook. Probably not, but it really didn’t matter, they’d get by. They deserved each other, two stray dogs, sniffing, frolicking, growling, fighting, fucking—they’d mess it up in due time, but it’d be great fun while it lasted, and who could say that they wouldn’t find something this time around, something that would glue them together for the rest of the way? Willow slept until nearly one o’clock in the afternoon—more than two hours without a nightmare. For Willow that was unusual.