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Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Mission Hill, Roxbury
THE RADIO HAD forecast heavy snow, but only a few plows were on the deserted roads as the trolley made its way up Huntington Avenue. Two inches of snow lay on the ground and it continued to fall thick and heavy, but there was no wind, and to Cal the snowfall seemed to make the city even quieter and stranger. From the window of the trolley he saw no traffic or pedestrians and only now and again a glimpse of a plow working, its swirling amber lights sparking in the gloom. There was only one other passenger on the trolley, sleeping fitfully, and the driver didn’t even bother to turn on the interior light, so they passed through the city in darkness, the trolley’s bell clanging vacantly at empty intersections, and he stared from the window and watched the snow coming down. Because of ice on the tracks, the trolley trundled along the line like an aged arthritic, and it took him forty minutes to get to Mission Hill.
He sat near the front of the church, his head lowered, hands clasped and resting atop the pew back before him. He had his eyes closed, and his senses filled with the muted voices of prayer murmuring throughout the church—so purposeful and insistent in seeking solace, peace, the intercession of the saints and of the Virgin Mary on behalf of a loved one. And though he tried to pray, he couldn’t focus; for the third time he forgot what prayer he was reciting and began it again and then, frustrated, whispered the words so that he might hear them. Still, the words and their meanings passed through his head as if it were a sieve and he remained empty-feeling and agitated. He exhaled and looked up.
Above the altar the hands of Christ were held to the cross by the spikes driven through his palms; he stared at the hands, the rigid tendons of his alabaster wrists, flexing as if from the pain as the weight of his body and the force of gravity drew him down and the nails tore through his hands, and for a brief moment Cal was inside the cold of the trailer again and staring at the hands of the dead women bound by chains to dangling meat hooks.
AT MICKI’S ON Tremont, Cal ordered a double whiskey and went to the pay phone by the betting board at the back of the room and called Dante. The operator patched him through and he listened to the flat whine of a dead line and remembered their phone had been cut. He picked up the receiver again, stared blankly at the day’s races marked in white chalk, the horses, and their odds, as he waited for the switchboard operator. At the morgue the phone rang and the operator cut in twice to ask if he wanted her to keep trying. Finally a breathless technician picked up and Cal had to wait while he went to look for Fierro. Through the static on the line he could hear the squeal and slam of doors being opened and closed, and what he took to be the whirring buzz of a dissecting saw. Two drunk men by the jukebox with their arms about each other’s shoulders began to sing “You’re Breaking my Heart,” a painful baying that brought the hairs up on the back of his neck and forced him to lean in over the phone. The operator cut in again asking for another nickel and, cursing, he rummaged in his pocket for change, deposited a nickel and two dimes.
The familiar moribund voice came on the line, wheezing as if he’d picked up Owen’s cold: “Fierro.”
“It’s Cal, Tony. I need your help.”
“Cal, I really don’t have the time. I’ve got four bodies from a car that went into the Charles at dawn, I’ve got—”
“I need you to look at the bodies again, just the photos. I need to know something.”
“What’s this about, Cal?”
“Just look at the photos and tell me if the markings on the wrists are different. If Sheila’s markings are different from the other girls’.”
“Cal, I can’t—”
“Tony, this is the last thing I’m asking you in the world.”
Fierro paused on the other end of the line and he heard the strike of a match and a soft exhale and knew Fierro was smoking. After a moment: “All right, give me a couple of minutes to pull the file.”
While he waited he placed the phone down and went to the bar to get another double, then returned, put the phone back to his ear, listened to the odd hiss of static from the line, the distant, muted sounds of the morgue. A gurney rattled by once, amplified and close, like the sound of the elevated subway passing, thumping in his ears, then the line became quiet again. He sipped his whiskey slowly, rolling it in his mouth but not really tasting it anymore. Three men stood to his right before the betting board discussing the horses running later on the West Coast, and he turned his back to them, knew that once they made their picks they’d want to use the phone to call their bookies. The door of the bar opened as someone stepped inside and a blast of cold air traveled the length of the room.
Fierro came on the line clicking his tongue, as if with annoyance. “The ligature marks aren’t the same,” he said, and Cal could picture him frowning. “The others were clearly bound by some kind of metal cuff. It didn’t fully bind the wrists, so there are only marks at contact points on the wrist. Sheila’s looks to be a thin rope of some kind—you can make out the braid of the different fibers. I should have noticed that, but I don’t see how that changes anything. The killer probably used what was at hand.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. I just needed to know.”
“You sure that’s all?”
“That’s all. Thanks, Tony. I owe you one.”
Cal put the phone down, stared at the wall, and slowly finished his drink. He sensed one of the three men to his right waiting for the phone, and he turned away from him. He picked up the receiver again and tried calling Kelly’s Rose to see if Dante was there, but there was no answer and he hung up, walked back up the bar, mulling the discovery in his head. Sheila wasn’t killed in the trailer with the other girls; it was only made to look that way. He saw Blackie climbing into the rig down at the Calf Pasture, checking and knowing the seal on the doors had been tampered with because, of course, he’d already been there a few nights earlier depositing Sheila’s torn underthings, the purse, and the crucifix, placing them where he knew they’d be found.