The Big Bad City Read Online Free Page A

bands?”
    “Symbolizing the marriage to …”
    “Oh. No. I’m sorry. I don’t.”
    Well, Carella could have spent the next week and a half zeroing in on the orders that still wore wedding bands with the initials IHS engraved inside, or he could have spent the next
month
and a half calling every convent in the directory—none of which had listed phone numbers, he noticed, another plus—but there was an easier way.
    A surefire American way.
    He went directly to the media.

2
    S UPPOSE YOU GET ON A BUS, AND THE DRIVER IS D USTIN H OFFMAN ? I MEAN, THERE’S THIS GUY SITTING BEHIND the wheel, and he looks just like Dustin Hoffman and everything, but you know he isn’t Dustin Hoffman because there aren’t any cameras around, they’re not shooting a movie or anything on the bus. This is just a normal bus and a normal bus driver who happens to look just like Dustin Hoffman. Do you understand me?”
    “Uh-huh,” Carella said.
    “That’s the way I felt when I saw that police sketch of Mary on the front page of the newspaper. I thought ‘That isn’t Mary, it can’t be Mary.’ Same as I would think ‘That isn’t Dustin Hoffman, it’s just a bus driver.’
Is
it Mary?”
    “You’ll have to tell us,” Carella said.
    “I mean, I just saw her
yesterday
, and everything.”
    They were in the Chevy sedan Carella and Brown drove whenever their preferred car was in for service, as it was today. The girl’s name—they thought of her as a girl because she was still in her early twenties—was Helen Daniels, and she was sitting on the back seat, smoking. She was a nurse, but she was smoking. She had told them on the phone that the woman on the front page of that morning’s tabloid was Sister Mary Vincent. It was now close to noon on a steamy Saturday, the twenty-second day of August, and they were driving her to the morgue.
    “When yesterday?” Brown asked.
    “At the hospital.”
    Which answered
where
yesterday, but not
when
.
    They waited.
    “We worked the same shift. Seven in the morning to three in the afternoon.”
    “Was she a nurse?”
    “An LPN. St. Margaret’s is one of the hospitals run by her order. She worked with the terminally ill. Cancer patients mostly.”
    “What’s an LPN?” Brown asked.
    “A licensed practical nurse. But she was better than any RN
I
know, believe me.”
    “Was that the last time you saw her? Yesterday at three? When the shift …”
    “Yes. Well, not three. We went for coffee together after the shift broke.”
    “Then what?”
    “I went to the subway.”
    “Where’d
she
go?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Didn’t say where she was going?”
    “I guessed she was going home. It was already four, four-thirty.”
    “How long have you known her?” Carella asked.
    “Be six months in September. That’s when she started working at St. Margaret’s.”
    “How’d she get along there?”
    “Fine.”
    “Good worker?”
    “Oh, yes.”
    “Got along with the other nuns?”
    “Yes.”
    “Nurses?”
    “Yes, of course.”
    “Doctors?”
    “Yes.”
    “While you were having coffee …,” Brown said. “Where was this, by the way?”
    “Deli across the street from the hospital.”
    “See anybody watching her?”
    “Paying unusual attention to her?”
    “No, I can’t think of anyone.”
    “Anyone follow you out of the deli?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “When you left each other, was she walking, or did she catch a cab, or what?”
    “She was walking.”
    “In which direction?”
    “She turned the corner and headed crosstown.”
    “Toward the park?”
    “Yes. Toward the park.”
    Helen Daniels was a nurse, and so she did not display any squeamishness at being inside a morgue. This was not the hospital for which she worked, but it was nonetheless familiar territory. She followed the detectives into the stainless-steel chamber with its stainless-steel dissecting tables and stainless-steel drawers, and watched while the attendant on duty rolled out the drawer