CHAPTER 73

From deep distress I call to Thee,

O God, I pray Thou hear me!

Hymn by Martin Luther

“What did she say?” Homer wanted to know. “Did Helen tell you anything? She must have said something.”

Mary shook her head. “Wait,” she said. “Not now.”

Alan and Homer sat in silence while Mary drove fiercely along Beacon Street, plunging around double-parked delivery vans, jolting to a stop at intersections. Waiting for a green light in Kenmore Square, she turned angrily to Homer. “She won the Prix de Rome, she was so good. There she was in Paris, off to a brilliant start, and then she began noticing the symptoms of her father’s disease. It’s inherited, Huntington’s, and each child has a fifty percent chance of getting it. But it’s not just the disease.” The light changed. Mary jerked the car forward and glowered at the oncoming cars.

“You mean her mother,” said Homer softly. “Life with a disappointed coloratura.”

Mary thumped the steering wheel. “The torments of hell, that’s what it’s been like.”

“Well, that was pretty obvious,” said Alan. “Look, why don’t you come up to my place? How are your brakes? It’s really steep on my hill.”

Alan’s room was a mess. “Sorry,” he said, shoving things off the bed, which was the only place to sit down. “Oh, God, I’ve only got one bottle of beer. Here, we’ll divvy it up. I’ve got some corn chips somewhere.”

Mary waved away the beer and the corn chips. She was ready to talk, to pour out everything Helen had told her. “First about the fires.”

Homer gasped. “The fires! Was that Philip? The fire in the church, that was his work, wasn’t it? It wasn’t Rosie, it wasn’t Kraeger, it wasn’t Castle?”

“Of course it wasn’t,” said Mary. “Helen said Pip had been setting fires since he was eight years old. First it was just wastebaskets. She’d find a flaming wastebasket full of her dolls. He was paying her back for being her father’s favorite. You know, the cute little curly-headed tyke with a tiny violin. Next he burned up the violin.”

Homer shook his head sadly. “Pyromania, it’s an addiction like gambling. Once you get started, you can’t stop.”

“Then he got more sophisticated. In high school he studied chemistry and figured out that trick about mixing incendiary material with water, and then he burned down a couple of Baptist churches. This time he was getting back at his parents. They were both strong churchgoing Baptists.”

“My God,” said Alan.

“Ah, yes,” said Homer, remembering the printout from Sergeant Drum’s cross-referenced file drawer. “He went to prison for one of those.”

“But what about his music?” said Alan. “When did he start playing the organ?”

“I’m coming to that.” Mary heaved herself off Alan’s bed and began walking around the room, stepping over scattered books and shoes and a nest of coffee cups. “Helen said Pip was musically gifted too, he could play the piano like anything, so after getting out of Concord Reformatory—no, they don’t call it a reformatory, what do they call it, Homer?”

“A correctional facility.” Homer emptied his bag of corn chips. “Only I doubt they do much correcting, or reforming either. They used to be penitentiaries, only nobody ever repented.”

“Anyway,” said Mary, “Pip had this musical gift, and he got serious about it and started taking organ lessons. And from then on, he did better and better. There were no more fires. He won a scholarship to the New England Conservatory. They were all so proud of him. By this time his father had lost so much strength he couldn’t work any more, so his mother got a job as a practical nurse and supported the family. She really did sacrifice herself, working twelve hours a day while Helen went to Paris and Pip studied with James Castle and won a big national award—”

“Annual competition, American Guild of Organists, big honor.” Alan found another bag of chips and handed it to Homer.

Mary sank down on the bed again. “Then everything went to hell. It was Helen’s turn to get sick.”

Homer offered her the bag of chips. “She was studying in Paris then?”

Mary waved the bag away. “Oh, God, Homer, imagine what it must have been like. She couldn’t hold a fiddle bow. She’d watched her father waste away, and now it was her turn. She had to go home and take his place as an invalid in her mother’s care—and you’ve seen what that’s like.” Restlessly Mary unfolded herself from the bed and went to the window to look down at the cars slowly negotiating the hill, creeping down to Cambridge Street. “It was so extraordinary, listening to her, there in that little park at the end of the block. She sat in that wheelchair gesturing with her cramped little hands and poured it all out. I just stood there leaning against a tree, listening. I hardly had to say a word. She wanted to tell me. She was dying to tell me.”

For a minute they were silent. Then Alan asked a sarcastic question. “Was it true her mother could have been an operatic soprano?”

“Oh, I doubt it, don’t you?” Mary couldn’t keep the scorn out of her voice. “It was just something to add to her list of grievances. Oh, she’d sacrificed for her kids, all right, but I doubt she gave up a great career.”

“So from now on everything depended on Pip?” Nervously Alan began picking up dirty dishes from the floor and dumping them in the sink.

Mary handed him Homer’s empty glass. “From now on it’s pretty sickening. Pip had a few organ students, but it wasn’t enough income, so he worked in a copy shop and at Boston City Hospital. Well, you know what hospital orderlies do. They run errands and clean up operating rooms after surgery, grubby jobs like that. But then one day he happened to see James Castle come out of the office of one of the cancer specialists in the hospital, and then the doctor asked Pip to go for Castle’s X ray. So on the way back Pip took a look at it, and there was a big shadow on it.”

“Stomach cancer,” murmured Homer. “Oh, Alan, that reminds me. I found out about that barrel of snakes.”

“Snakes? What barrel of snakes?”

“Castle’s family. Remember, you told me his mother was yelling at him, and his sister was sick and his whole family were standing around looking green, last Thanksgiving when Martin walked in on them? Well, Castle told Martin what it was all about, and Martin told me. The doctors had told Castle his chances of survival were poor, so he told his family he wasn’t going to have the surgery, he was just going to let things take their course. So his mother got all excited and started screaming at him. She wasn’t some kind of a hysterical person, she was a normal mother wanting to save her son’s life. So he gave in and had the surgery and everything went well.”

“What about his sister?” said Alan. “Did she have some kind of dangerous disease too?”

Homer laughed. “The only disease his sister had is called pregnancy. A few days later she gave birth to a nine-pound baby girl. Martin’s going to baptize her next week.”

Alan tried to gather his wits. “But back before he went to New York to have the surgery, Pip Tower saw his X ray in Boston City Hospital, and so he knew what none of the rest of us knew. He knew Castle was very ill.”

“Right, and he assumed he would die.”

“Castle would die and his organ bench would be empty. Permanently.” Alan picked up a shirt from the floor, then dropped it again. “That’s why it was so important to be his substitute. Oh, Jesus, and they appointed me. I played that damnfool music and the stupid committee appointed me.”

“Hold it,” said Homer. “Let’s get back to Boston City Hospital. That’s where Pip was working, and that’s where the morgue is—the morgue where that useful body came from, the morgue where it turned up again after it had been burned, the very same morgue where somebody made a mistake and sent the body to be cremated. Am I right?”

“Of course you’re right.” Mary winced and shrugged her shoulders. “Pip knew his way around, he knew how to fill out the proper forms, he knew how to switch them around. It was all his doing.”

“Then it was Pip who stole Boozer’s hearse and came to the morgue to pick up the body of that poor hooker. He must have had phony papers, just like me. But how did he—ah!” Homer slapped his knee. “He worked in a copy shop. He created the phony papers in the copy shop. Nothing to it.”

“Helen said he didn’t drive the hearse himself, because the man who hands out bodies might have recognized him. So his mother drove it. Talk about maternal self-sacrifice—you have to hand it to the woman.”

“Well, all right,” said Homer. “So now he had the miscellaneous cadaver, and he put it in Rosie’s car, and drove it into a ditch and set fire to it.”

“No, Pip didn’t drive it. He hired one of his fellow orderlies, a guy who owed him money.”

Alan laughed bitterly. “So I was right. It wasn’t Rosie who turned the car radio to that hard rock station. It was somebody else, some sleazeball.”

Homer looked down regretfully at his empty beer glass. “Sleazeball is right.”

Alan tipped up the can of beer and emptied the last drops into Homer’s glass. “Well, okay, so Pip went to all that trouble to get rid of Rosie, because she couldn’t very well get Castle’s job if she was supposed to be dead, right? But what about the rest of the good organists in Boston? They were competitors too. What about Oates? Oh, I get it—those messed-up organs, that wasn’t Oates, I knew it wasn’t Oates!”

“No, it wasn’t Oates, it was Pip.” Mary shook her head angrily. “What really makes me mad is the way he got Oates drinking again. He kept sending him booze. That was terrible. And he double-crossed Barbara Inch. He switched a couple of pipes on the Commonwealth organ during a service, so it sounded like her own awful blunders. That was a mean trick.”

Homer held up a cautionary finger. “But what about the ladder in the organ at Annunciation? Pip fell victim to that dirty trick himself.”

“That was to throw us off. He didn’t really fall from the ladder. He stood on the tracker rods and fell into them very carefully.”

“Damn him anyway,” said Alan. “But look, why didn’t he sabotage me? There I was, smack in his way, holding down the job he wanted. Why didn’t he try to get rid of me?”

Mary laughed. “Luckily you saved yourself. You told him you didn’t want the job anyway. As soon as Castle came back, you were going into organ building full time.”

“But what about Charley?” said Homer. “On the night Alan found him, why was Charley still there? Why didn’t Pip take Charley too?”

“Panic. There he was, with Rosie on his hands, bleeding and unconscious, so he carried her out of the house, leaving all the doors open, and while he was dumping her in the car a neighbor leaned out a window and said, ‘Hey, what’s going on down there?’ So Pip jumped into the car and drove away and turned Rosie over to his mother, the practical nurse.”

“A neighbor saw him?” said Alan. “Why didn’t the neighbor call the police?”

“Oh, neighbors,” grumbled Homer, “they witness muggings and rapes and murders, and say tut-tut and go back to baking cookies, or whatever. I’ll look into it. How badly was she hurt?”

“I gather it was pretty bad. Helen thought Rosie was dying. Fortunately her mother knew the most essential things to do right away, and kept her alive.”

“Thank God,” whispered Alan.

Mary was suddenly ravenously hungry. “Alan, you must have something in this place besides corn chips.” She poked in his cupboard. “Look, I thought so. There’s a lot of baby food in here, yummy little jars of apricots and peaches, and here’s a can of soup. I’ll heat it up. Have you got a pan around here somewhere?”

Alan found one on the floor under a phone book. He had to ransack the room for the can opener, which turned up at last wedged under a closet door. Mary opened the can and stirred the pot. Warm smells of vegetable soup rose from the stove.

“What about Helen and Rosie?” said Alan. “They were living there together, with Helen’s mother taking care of them both. What was that like?”

Mary made a face. “Well, you can imagine what it was like. A domineering embittered woman, feeling trapped once again, taking it out on the two of them. But for Helen it was a relief. They were friends. In that grim household, the two of them clung to each other.”

“So what about Charley?” said Homer, gratefully accepting a bowl of soup. “Remember that day when Alan said he saw his mother? Did Rosie really go back to her house that day?”

“I asked Helen. She said Rosie did go back. She persuaded Pip she needed more of her own things. Actually she just wanted to be sure Charley wasn’t still there, abandoned and starving.”

“Her hat!” Alan waved his soup spoon triumphantly. “Remember, I said she was wearing a white hat? It was a bandage around her poor head. It was Rosie, all right. Charley was one hundred percent correct.”

Homer finished his bowl of soup and licked the spoon. “Are you sure this young woman was really telling you the truth? How did she know what Pip was doing?”

Mary shook her head, as if she didn’t believe it herself. “He told her things she didn’t want to know. He whispered things to her, he bragged about everything. If she gave him away, he said, he’d set fire to her bed while she was asleep.” Mary looked angrily at Homer. “We’ve got to do something about her, Homer. We’ve got to get her out of there.”

“I can see that, but how?”

It was late. They were all exhausted. Mary smoothed Alan’s bed, Homer pulled himself upright with a groan, and they said goodbye.

Alan listened to their footsteps receding down the stairs. Then, reaching eagerly into his pocket, he found the slip of paper with Rosie’s address, and took it to the table where his typewriter was gathering dust. He had a letter to write.

But at once he jumped up and went to the window and threw up the sash and shouted down at Mary and Homer as they climbed into their car. “He had it too, didn’t he? I saw it, but I didn’t recognize it. I saw him knock over a glass, and then he had a hard time standing up. Huntington’s disease, he was getting it too?”

Mary looked up at him. “Yes, that’s right. Helen told me she knew what was happening to him. She recognized the symptoms so well. It was the only time she cried.”

Alan wanted to say that it was horrible, but he couldn’t utter another word. He could only shake his head and slam down the window, while the car pulled out from the curb and crept down the steep hill, heading for home.