father, he saw, had finally focused on his face, viewing it with confused wonder.
“Mr. Alvarez, would you rather we postponed this for a few more days?” Carmine asked softly.
“No,” the father whispered, dry-eyed. “We will manage.”
Yes, but can I?
Luis returned, tears gone.
“Just the same old questions, Luis. I know you’ve already been asked them a million times, but memories can bury themselves and then suddenly come back for no reason, which is why I’m asking them again. I understand that you and Mercedes went to different schools, but I’ve been told that you were great pals. Girls as pretty as Mercedes get noticed, that’s natural. Did she ever complain about being noticed? Followed? Watched from a car or by someone on the other side of the street?
“No, Lieutenant, honestly. Boys would wolf-whistle her, but she ignored them.”
“What about when she worked as a candystriper last summer?”
“She never said anything to me that wasn’t about the patients and how nice the sisters were to her. They only let her into the maternity hospital. She loved it.”
He was beginning to weep again: time to stop. Carmine smiled and nodded toward the kitchen.
“I apologize,” he said to Mr. Alvarez when the boy was gone.
“We realize that you must ask and ask, Lieutenant.”
“Was Mercedes a confiding child, sir? Did she discuss things with her mother or with you?”
“She confided in both of us all the time. Her life pleased her, she loved to talk about it.” A great spasm went through him, he had to cling to the arms of his chair to suppress it. The eyes that stared into Carmine’s own were transfixed with pain, while the mother’s seemed to stare into the depths of hell. “Lieutenant, we have been told what was done to her, but it is almost impossible to believe. We have been told that Mercedes is your case, that you know more about what happened to her than the Norwalk police do.” His voice went thin with urgency. “Please, I beg you, tell me! Did she—did my little girl suffer?”
Carmine swallowed, impaled on those eyes. “Only God really knows the answer, but I don’t think God could be so cruel. A murder of this kind needn’t be done to watch the victim suffer. The man may well have given Mercedes drugs to make her sleep through it. Of one thing you can be sure: it was not God’s purpose to make her suffer. If you believe in God, then believe that she didn’t suffer.”
And God forgive me for that lie, but how could I tell this devastated father the truth? He sits there, dead in mind, dead in spirit, sixteen years of love, care, worry, joy and minor sorrows gone up like a puff of smoke from an incinerator. Why should I share my opinion of God with him and make his loss worse? He has to pick up the pieces and continue; there are five other children who need him, and a wife whose heart isn’t merely broken—it’s mashed to pulp.
“Thank you,” said Mrs. Alvarez suddenly.
“Thank you for bearing with me,” Carmine said.
“You comforted them immeasurably,” said Father Tesoriero on the way to the door. “But Mercedes did suffer, didn’t she?”
“My guess is, beyond description. It’s hard to be in my line of work and believe in God, Father.”
Two journalists had appeared on the street, one with a microphone, the other with a notepad. When Carmine emerged they ran toward him, only to be roughly shoved away.
“Fuck off, you vultures!” he snarled, climbed into the Ford and drove away in a hurry.
Several blocks later, sure no reporters were on his tail, he pulled in to the side of the road and let his feelings overwhelm him. Did she suffer? Yes, yes, yes, she suffered! She suffered hideously, and he made sure she stayed awake for all of it. Her last glimpse of life must have been her own blood flowing down a drain hole, but her family must never know that. I’ve gone way beyond disbelief in God. I believe that the world belongs to the Devil. I believe that the Devil is infinitely more powerful than God. And the soldiers of goodness, if not of God, are losing the war.
AS COLUMBUS DAY wasn’t a public holiday, nothing impeded the gathering of the Hughlings Jackson Center for Neurological Research Board of Governors at 11 a.m. in the fourth floor boardroom. Well aware that he hadn’t been invited, Carmine had every intention of sitting in. So he arrived early, took a thin china mug to the hall coffee urn, helped himself to two jelly donuts on a thin china plate, and had the effrontery to sit in the far end chair, which he turned to face the window.
At least “effrontery” was what Miss Desdemona Dupre called it when she strode in to find him curling his tongue sensuously around the Board’s goodies.
“You’re lucky, you know,” was Carmine’s reply. “If the Holloman Hospital architects hadn’t decided to put the parking lot in front of the building, you’d have no view at all. As it is, you can see all the way to Long Island. Isn’t it a beautiful day? The fall is just about at its best, and while I mourn the passing of the elms, you can’t beat maples for color. Their leaves have invented new shades at the warm end of the spectrum.”
“I didn’t realize you had either the words or the science to express yourself!” she snapped, eyes like ice. “You are sitting in the Governor-in-Chief’s chair and partaking of refreshments to which you are not entitled! Kindly pick up your traps and go!”
At which moment the Prof walked in, propped at the sight of Lieutenant Delmonico, and sighed deeply. “Oh, dear, I hadn’t thought of you,” he said to Carmine.
“Whether you like it or not, Professor, I have to be here.”
President Mawson MacIntosh of Chubb University arrived before the Prof could answer, beamed at Carmine and shook him warmly by the hand. “Carmine! I might have known that Silvestri would put you on this,” said M.M., as he was universally known. “I am tremendously cheered. Here, sit next to me. And don’t,” he added in a conspiratorial whisper, “waste your taste buds on the donuts. Try the apple Danish.”
Miss Desdemona Dupre made a small sound of suppressed fury and marched out of the room, colliding with Dean Dowling and his own neurology professor, Frank Watson. He who authored “the Hug” and its staff of “Huggers”.
M.M., whom Carmine knew well from several awkwardly delicate internal Chubb cases, looked far more imposing than that other President, he of the United States of America. M.M. was tall, perfectly dressed, trim in the waist, his handsome face crowned by a head of luxuriant hair whose original auburn had transformed to a wonderful apricot. An American aristocrat to his fingertips. Despite his height, L.B.J. paled to insignificance whenever the two men stood side by side, which they did occasionally. But persons of M.M.’s august lineage would far rather preside over a great university than over an undisciplined bunch of rowdies like Congress.
On the other hand, Dean Wilbur Dowling looked the psychiatrist he was: untidily dressed in a combination of tweed, flannel and a pink bow tie with red polka dots, he wore a bushy brown beard to counterbalance
