“Live happily ever after?”
“Yes, I will. I will.”
Although Quinn was able to maneuver the car between the trees right up to the kitchen door, it took all three of them, Karma and Brother Tongue and himself, to get Sister Blessing into the back seat. Brother Tongue put a folded blanket under her head and a moist cloth across her forehead. This time she didn’t twitch away or moan in protest. She had lost consciousness.
Both men realized it was a bad sign but Karma didn’t. “She’s gone to sleep. That means the pain must be better and she’s going to be all right, doesn’t it? She’ll live happily ever after, won’t she?”
Quinn was too busy to answer, and Brother Tongue said, “Shut up,” in a voice that had a squawk in it, like a door hinge long unused, unoiled.
The unexpected sound, and the fury behind it, shocked Karma into silence.
Quinn said to Brother Tongue, who was wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his robe, “Do you think there’s any danger of her falling off the seat?”
“Not if you drive slowly.”
“I can’t afford to drive slowly.”
“The gates of heaven are opening for her? Is that what you’re saying?”
“She’s very ill.”
“Oh God. Please God, grant an easy end to her suffering.”
Quinn got into the car and started down the slope to the dirt lane. In the rear-view mirror he could see Brother Tongue down on his knees praying, his hands lifted toward the sky in supplication. A moment later the Brother was swallowed up by trees, and nothing of the Tower or its outbuildings was visible to Quinn.
He came to the end of the irrigated land, and the trees became gradually more stunted and misshapen. The bleak brown countryside, that could support so little life, seemed a fitting place to die.
“Sister? Can you hear me, Sister? If someone did this to you, it’s my fault. I disobeyed your orders. You told me not to try and contact O’Gorman, that it might do a lot of harm. Just find out where he is, you said, and report to you. I should have listened to you. I’m sorry. Please hear me, Sister. I’m sorry.”
Sorry. The word echoed from the sheer walls of rock that lined parts of the road, I’m sorry, and the gray inert mass on the back seat stirred slightly. Quinn’s eye caught the movement in the mirror.
“Why did you hire me to find a dead man, Sister?”
There was no response.
“When you ordered me not to contact him, you couldn’t have known he was dead. Yet you must have guessed there was something peculiar going on that involved O’Gorman. Who could have told you except the murderer? And why after all these years did he decide to confess the crime in a letter? Was it because I asked you last week to give Martha O’Gorman a break, put an end to her uncertainty?... Was the letter of confession forced on the murderer by you? And why have you been trying to protect him?”
She let out a sudden cry of pain or protest.
“Did you believe he was penitent, Sister, and would never kill again?”
Another cry, more vehement than the first, like a child’s wail of rage at an injustice. The rage was unmistakable, but Quinn wasn’t sure whether it was directed at him for his questions, or at the killer for his betrayal, or at still a third person.
“Who killed O’Gorman, Sister?”
Eighteen
Through the emergency entrance of the San Felice hospital, Sister Blessing was carried on a stretcher. A young interne led Quinn into a waiting room hardly larger than a piano crate, and the questions began.
What was the name of the sick woman? Who was her closest relative? How old was she? Was she under treatment for any chronic disease or infection? What were the initial signs of her present illness? When had she last eaten, and what? Did she vomit? Was the vomitus discolored? Did it have an odor? Did she have difficulty speaking? Breathing? Had she passed any bloody urine or bloody stools? Was there rigidity of the muscles? Twitching? Face livid or flushed? Hands cold or warm? Was she delirious? Drowsy? Were the pupils of her eyes expanded or contracted? Were there burn marks around her mouth and chin?
“I’m sorry, I can’t answer all those questions,” Quinn said. “I’m not a trained medical observer.”
“You did all right. Wait here, please.”
For almost half an hour he was left alone in the room. It was stifling hot and smelled of antiseptic and something sour, the sweat and fear of all the people who had waited in this room before him, and watched the door and prayed. The smell seemed to become stronger until he could taste it in the back of his throat.
He got up to open the door and almost collided on the threshold with a tall, thickset man. He looked like a rancher. He wore a broad-brimmed Stetson hat, a rumpled Western-style suit and, in place of a tie, a leather thong fastened with a large turquoise and silver clip. He had an air of wary cynicism about him, as if he’d spent too much time in places like emergency wards and no good had come out of any of them.
“Your name’s Quinn?”
“Yes.”
“May I see your identification, please?”
Quinn took the papers out of his wallet. The man glanced at them briefly and without much interest, as though obeying a rule he had little use for.
“I’m Sheriff Lassiter.” He returned the papers. “You brought a woman in here about an hour ago?”
“Yes.”
“Friend of yours?”
“I met her ten or eleven days ago.”
“Where?”
“At the Tower of Heaven. It’s a religious cult located in the mountains about fifty miles east of here.”
Lassiter’s expression suggested that he had had dealings at the Tower, and not very pleasant ones. “How come you got mixed up with an outfit like that?”
“By mistake.”
“You haven’t been living there?”
“No.”
“This is going to take all night if you just stand there saying yes and no. Can’t you volunteer some information?”
“I don’t know where to begin.”
“Begin somewhere, that’s all I ask.”
“I drove to the Tower this morning from Chicote.” He went on to explain his meeting Mother Pureza on the road, and his subsequent discovery of the dead man. He described the construction of the inner court, the position of the body in relation to it and the circumstances of the death.
The sheriff listened, his only sign of interest a slight narrowing of the eyes. “Who was the man?”
“George Haywood. He owned a real estate business in Chicote.”
“He fell or was pushed from the top level, no way of knowing which?”
“None that I could see.”
“This is a bad day for your friends, Mr. Quinn.”
“I saw Haywood only once before in my life, you could hardly call him a friend.”
“You saw him only once,” Lassiter repeated, “and yet you identified the body immediately, even though the face was battered in and covered with blood? You must have more highly developed eyesight than the rest of us.”
“I recognized his car.”
“By the license plates?”
“No.”
“The registration on the steering wheel?”
“No. By the make and model.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes.”
“Now wait a minute, Mr. Quinn. You saw a car in the vicinity the same make and model as Haywood’s and you immediately assumed it was his?”
“Yes.”
“Why? There are hundreds of identical cars on the roads.”
“Haywood left Chicote a few days ago under peculiar circumstances,” Quinn said. “He told his mother and friends he was flying to Hawaii, but one of his associates checked the airlines and discovered his name wasn’t on any of the flight lists.”