They were screaming at one another now.
“You bet I’m on a tangent.” Cardozo snatched up the phone and punched out a number. Over the noise of the ball game a phone rang in the squad room. “Greg—I want you and Siegel and Malloy to tail Monserat. Round the clock. I want a tap on his phone. I want to know where he goes, who he talks to, and I don’t want him near Cordelia Koenig.”
When he hung up, MacGill’s eyes were waiting for his, narrowed and concerned. “You can’t do that.”
“Screw can’t,” he said.
53
“I NEVER THOUGHT I’D spend a night in this house again.”
Cordelia’s voice came wonderingly across the room.
Babe looked up and smiled. “It’s like the old days to have you back—even if it’s only till the carpenters put up your walls again.”
The two of them had been sitting there for over an hour. At first they had talked, and then, yielding to a sort of insinuating gravity, they had let the faint fingers of drizzle against the windows lull them into increasingly longer silences.
“Strange,” Cordelia said. “This place still feels like home to me.”
“I’m glad.”
“It makes me remember.” Today Cordelia had tied her hair back with a wide blue band that matched her eyes. In the soft cone of dimmed light her hair was the color of fresh cornbread. “It makes me think how life could have been—and how lousy it turned out instead.”
The sudden vehemence in the girl’s voice caught Babe unprepared. “Nothing’s turned out lousy,” Babe said.
“I have.”
“That’s not true.”
“How can you stand having me here?” Cordelia cried. “How can you sleep in that bed knowing I’m only a room away? How can you stand me at all?”
Babe crinkled her eyes in puzzlement. “You’re my daughter. I love you.”
“That’s not possible.” With a crackling of slick paper Cordelia threw her magazine to the floor and sprang to her feet. “You can’t love me after what I did.”
“You didn’t—” Babe drew back, taking a moment to choose her words, to find the tone for them. “You needed someone to show you the way. I should have been there for you and I wasn’t.”
“A lot of mothers aren’t there for their children.” Cordelia hugged her arms around herself. “But their children don’t give them lethal injections.”
Babe drew in a long inhalation and slowly let it out. “You did what you were told to do. You trusted someone, and he didn’t deserve your trust. You were a child. You were used.”
Cordelia turned, her eyes sharp and challenging. “You really believe that.”
“Yes I believe it, and I hate Lew Monserat for what he did to you. I’ll never forgive myself for abandoning you to people like him.”
Cordelia shrugged. “Don’t blame Lew. He hasn’t hurt me.”
Babe was astonished. “He sent that man to kill you.”
Cordelia flicked her a glance. “It’s not the way you think. It’s not Lew’s fault.”
Babe felt a darkness in her stomach. “Aren’t you even angry?” She rose from her chair. “Or frightened?”
“I suppose I’m frightened.” Cordelia’s voice was curiously flattened. “But why should I be angry at Lew? He can’t help anything.” She moved toward the piano. In deliberate slow motion she played with the chrysanthemums in the vase. “He’s no worse than me.”
Amazement gathered in the wrinkles of Babe’s forehead. “You can’t seriously put yourself on the same level as him.”
“I know my level. A man seduced me and gave me drugs and I loved it and I loved him. Now he wants to kill me and I don’t feel any differently about him. I’d let him kill me.”
Babe’s heart hit her a blow under her throat. “You don’t mean one word of that.”
“I still love him,” Cordelia said quietly, “and I don’t want to hurt him. That makes me as bad as him, doesn’t it?”
A sense of the utter hopelessness of the child invaded every pore of Babe’s body. He can’t have that much power over her, she told herself. How could anyone have that much power over another human being?
“When you fell in love,” Babe said, “if it was love—you were alone and helpless—and a child. You turned to someone you thought would protect you.”
“And what a good child I was. He handed me a syringe and told me to kill my own mother. And I did it. What a good, obedient child.”
“But you didn’t do it.” Babe’s voice was pleading. “That’s the difference between you and him. You couldn’t kill.”
Cordelia thought for a moment. “But I could do other things just as bad.” Then she added, “And don’t think I haven’t.”
“It wasn’t you doing those things. It was drugs doing them.”
“Drugs don’t create evil—they only fertilize it.” Cordelia raised the lid from the piano keyboard and rolled her knuckles across a cluster of black keys. A bright, childlike sound pinged through the livingroom. “I have evil inside me.”
“That’s untrue,” Babe said.
Cordelia shook her head. “It’s there. When I close my eyes it shows me pictures. Evil pictures. Sometimes it’s like a television set jammed to one channel. There’s no way I can turn it off.”
“Just because you imagine something evil doesn’t mean that you’ve done it or that you’re going to.”
Cordelia struck another clump of black notes on the piano. “Do you see things like that inside your head?”
“Everyone does.”
Interest hung behind Cordelia’s neutral expression. “Everyone?”
“Sure. Sometimes I see crazy mixtures of kindergarten and Marquis de Sade.”
The reaction on Cordelia’s face was held back. “Tell me about them.”
There was just an image in Babe’s mind, so small and shadowy that she had to work to keep hold of it. “Ever since my coma I’ve kept seeing a sort of cocktail party in a candlelit room. The guests are wearing evening clothes and joke store masks—Porky Pig and Minnie Mouse and Alice in Wonderland and Richard Nixon.”
Cordelia’s eyes snapped around.
Babe made a little laugh. “That shows you how whacked-out my mental processes are.”
“I don’t see what’s so evil about joke store masks,” Cordelia said.
“It turns evil,” Babe said.
She moved to the window and Cordelia’s gaze moved with her.
“There’s a young man in the room,” Babe said. “He’s naked—unconscious. I think he’s drugged. These people in the masks bind him to a sort of rack. They put a black leather hood over his face. And then Richard Nixon—”
The way Cordelia was standing there, folded in a curtain of shock, made Babe stop.
“Takes a knife from the table,” Cordelia said, “and cuts a circle in his chest.”
A jolt went through Babe. “How did you know that?”
Behind Cordelia’s bright shining eyes something fierce and excited was growing. “And then Richard Nixon cuts a Y inside the circle?”
“That’s right.” Babe couldn’t exhale. A kind of dreaming unreality invaded her.
“And you tell yourself it’s not really happening,” Cordelia said, “but then the Y starts bleeding and you know it’s real, and the young man screams through the mask and the scream is real too.”
A damp static crawled slowly across Babe’s skin. “And then Minnie Mouse …”
“Minnie Mouse puts her cigarette out,” Cordelia said. “She puts it out in the young man’s …”
“Hand.” Babe said.
Silence sank down onto the room.
“I don’t believe it.” Cordelia’s eyes took hold of her mother. “I saw them doing those things. I was there. I was standing at the door to his loft. I watched. And when I couldn’t stand watching any more of it I turned and ran and when I stopped running I was in your hospital room. You were the only person I could tell it to.”
A wave of icy heat washed up Babe’s spine. “You—told me?”
Cordelia nodded. “While you were in coma—I told you everything. I pretended you could hear me.” Pressing her lip between her teeth, Cordelia walked to the fireplace and stood gazing at the unlit logs. “I pretended you wanted to hear me—lying in your bed, so peaceful, always waiting for me, never running off anywhere. You were my best friend. And I was yours.” Cordelia’s voice developed an almost childish, singsong lilt. “I’d ask, Mother should I do this, should I do that. There’d be a catch in your breathing, because you heard me, and I’d count your breaths till the next catch. An even number meant yes and an odd number meant no. That was our code. And before I went home, I’d bend over you and kiss you and I’d say Mother I love you, I’m sorry I’ve hurt you—and if you ever get well I’ll never hurt you again.”