“Well, you can’t order the supplies and send them to your apartment in New York, but as long as you give the address of a church, then yes, you could. Anyone could.”
“So as long as it will be delivered to a parish or convent?”
He nodded.
“Do you think you have a priest on your hands?”
“We’re not ruling that out.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. A priest might be furious with hookers for being sinners, for tempting him, for flaunting their sexuality. But I have a hard time imagining a man who is still a priest combining his disgust for the women with disgust for his calling.”
“You lost me,” he said.
“I hope not.”
Noah smiled. That wide, easy smile. What had I said? What had he heard? I was embarrassed. I had meant it literally, hadn’t I? I hoped he was following my reasoning. But there was that damn innuendo. And I knew too much about the unconscious mind not to realize it. Except I had no time to stop and think about myself. Not yet, anyway.
“In the process of killing the women, he is defiling the sacraments,” I said.
“For a nice Jewish girl from New York City, you know a lot about Catholic priests.”
He knew more about me than I had told him. I was surprised that I wasn’t more surprised.
“I was married to a nice Catholic man.”
He nodded. “You’re divorced, aren’t you?”
A plain brown moth flew by us. It was bigger than the butterflies and shared nothing of their brilliance except when you looked closely at the designs on its wings, which were intricate. You barely noticed these creatures in the garden, but here, they were lovely.
“Yes. He’s not much of a Catholic anymore. But he was when I married him.”
“How long ago was that?”
“A little more than fourteen years ago.”
“What happened?”
I shrugged. “Nothing very dramatic. Usual stuff. Are you married?”
He shook his head. “Almost. We lived together for a while. A long while. She didn’t want to move to New York.”
I arched my eyebrows. “That isn’t much of a reason to leave someone you love.”
“No. That was the excuse. The truth was she couldn’t take the police work. She tried. But she got swallowed up by the darkness I’d bring home with me every night and I was too tired to figure out what to do about it.”
I wanted to tell him how similar that was to what had happened with me and Mitch, but I didn’t know how to say it in a way that wouldn’t sound as if I was just trying to find a common ground between us. So, in true therapist fashion, I remained silent.
He focused on my eyes for a long moment and I felt it, deep inside of me.
42
We walked out into the sunshine and stood on the wide stone steps of the museum, both of us blinking and readjusting to the noise and the light. At the bottom of the staircase, where we should have broken off and gone our separate ways, Noah took my arm in an old-fashioned gesture and we walked toward the street.
“Come with me. Coffee, a drink, something. We’re up against nothing but dead ends and I need more of your fresh thinking. If we don’t get a break in this case…” He didn’t finish his thought. He didn’t have to.
I nodded. My concentration was on my arm where he was holding me. How was I supposed to know what kind of touch this was? Swinging between the tired embraces of my now ex and the few wildly overt connections with the men I’d met in the Diablo Cigar Bar, I just didn’t know how to judge this, and that left me feeling amazingly young and stupid.
“Why are you smiling so oddly?” he asked.
“I didn’t know I was.” Now I really felt foolish.
“Well, you are.”
“I’m just not walking on a street I know. And that’s an unusual feeling for someone who has been walking these streets her whole life.”
“I hope you aren’t identifying a little too closely with this case.”
I had to stop and think for a minute, and then realizing the unintentional pun, laughed. “That is in terribly bad taste.”
“I know. I’m overtired. I’m angry. Punch-drunk.”
We reached the destination that Noah had picked out and went inside.
Café des Artistes is a well-known landmark in New York. A lovely restaurant graced with a mural of luscious nude women from the early 1900s.
“You know, I’ve never been here, either,” I offered as we walked to a table in the bar area. It was just five o’clock and the crowds hadn’t arrived yet.
“You’ve lived here your whole life and I’m showing you new sights?”
I nodded.
As soon as we sat down, Noah got up. “I’m sorry, I need to call in. If everyone is running around the same maze and there’s no reason for me to go back, I can have a real drink, instead of coffee. Order what you’d like. I’ll be right back.”
I couldn’t read his face when he returned five minutes later.
“So is it the hard stuff or the soft?” I asked him.
“The hard stuff. They think they have a lead on the nun’s habits, and the guys working the videotape think they have a match on a man seen at two of the hotels. Blurry, a shot from the side. But it’s something. Everyone knows what to do and no one needs me looking over his shoulder. I told Perez to get out of there, too. We’ve both been working eighteen-hour days all week. Neither of us will be any good tomorrow if we just sit there another night, searching for a ghost on our computers.”
The waiter arrived and I ordered a dirty martini. Noah said he’d have the same thing, then sat back in his chair and almost relaxed. It was his fingers that stayed alert, at the ready. For what? I wondered.
“So you are a girl after my own heart,” he said, his New Orleans accent making heart sound longer and musical. I liked listening to him, experienced the odd sensation that his words were reaching out and touching my skin, as if he were stroking me with those drawn-out syllables.
Who was I here?
In session with a patient, I was probing and fearless, but flirting was virgin territory for me.
The drinks came and Noah raised his elegant martini glass to mine in a silent toast. The liquid was icy and sharp and just a little salty.
I told him about the umbrella and the man on the street, and he asked me a few questions to see if he could spark any other memory from me about what the man looked like or how he acted. But I didn’t remember anything else that was helpful. “At the time it occurred to me that he might be following her…the way a moth will fly to a flame. Just because he was so attracted to her. Every man she passed on the street watched her.”
Noah took another sip of his drink, just listening.
“Have you found out anything about the pink-diamond cross?” I asked him.
“Yes, we have.” He pulled a notebook from his pocket and opened it to a page crammed with his loopy handwriting. He scanned one page, then another. “Perez just gave me this on the phone. We’ve identified two stores in the city that sell something like what you described. Graff-a place on Madison Avenue-and Cartier.”
I nodded, aware of them both. Two of the most exclusive jewelry stores in the city.
“And you were right. It is extravagantly expensive. More than $30,000 if it’s the same one you described. Sounds like it. Seven carats, total weight. Only five have been sold. By tomorrow morning we should have a court order to find out who purchased them.”
“How long will it take once you have that?”
“If we are lucky, sometime tomorrow. By Monday at the latest. The minute we find out, I’ll tell you. Do you know that much about Cleo’s life that you’ll recognize the name?”
“There’s a good chance I will.”
He looked surprised.
I took another sip of my drink and made a decision. “I need to confess something,” I said.