Grief Street

cup and saucer on the table. That ain’t right. Supposed to be everybody clean up after themselves right away—Sister’s rule. I go look at the cup, and see it’s tea gone cold. That’s strange. And that’s when it finally hits me the back door’s standing open.”
    “The door’s not ordinarily open?”
    “It’s open plenty. Just not when it’s getting to sundown is all.”
    “So you go outside then?”
    “I go to the door, poke my head out, and I call, ‘Sister Roberta, you out here?’ It’s dark, I can’t see nothing.”
    “No answer.”
    “No, sir. That’s when I figure something’s real wrong. So I shut the door in a hurry and I bolt it. Then I run upstairs for Sister, only she ain’t around...”
    “Nobody seen her since coming home,” somebody else said. it
    “That’s right,” Marie said. “We’re all right scared then-“So you came back downstairs together?”
    “And when we do, that’s when Doris seen the liquor out.”
    “That’s right,” Doris said. “Highly unusual. Sister takes a drink now and again, but not all alone like that.”
    “All right,” Kowalski said tiredly. “Thank you, ladies.” He left them there in the dining room and plodded through the kitchen. On the way out to the garden he stopped to ask the forensics officers if they had found anything useful.
    “Find us the rapist, and it’s nothing to make a DNA match to the semen we scraped out of the nun,” said the unit leader. He was a forty-year-old stocky guy by the name of Baldwin. Kowalski found him at the kitchen table, bent over a portable microscope and looking at advance specimens on glass slides. “But we’re not dealing here with the so-to-speak garden variety rapist, are we?”
    “We sure ain’t.”
    “In that case, we’re not likely to find DNA patterns on federal profile. So we can’t advance a suspect.” Baldwin returned to his microscope and continued talking. “That leaves us nothing but old-fashioned fingerprints, of which I’d say offhand we’ve got only one set. We’ll know something inside of twenty-four hours, Sarge, but I can tell you by experience that somebody was wearing gloves. And I don’t imagine that was Sister.”
    “Like what do you mean—latex gloves?”
    “No. I’d say a fine fabric of some sort.”
    “Okay, thanks,” Kowalski said. He had to turn sideways to get through the door into the open air, to where Sister Roberta had been attacked. She had long since been taken by ambulance to Roosevelt Hospital. Webster and Matson Were still walking up and down the garden rows with their torches. Kowalski called to them, “Find it yet?”
    Both officers responded in the negative.
    Jesus Christ!” Kowalski quietly cursed. The air was just cool enough for his breath to hang for a second in the black-and-blue night, after which he crossed himself. “Jesus freaking Christ!”

    Kowalski had now told me everything. Everything, that is, up to the point of his stopping by Roosevelt Hospital to check on Sister Roberta’s condition and then knowing where to find me so he could tell me the story.
    We were standing outside Godwin’s house on East Sixty-fourth Street, at about the same spot where the plastered young guys had earlier stumbled out to relieve themselves of too much liquor. Kowalski was smoking one of his Te-Amos. My head and stomach were feeling about the same as the young pukers.
    “Let me guess,” I said, “they didn’t find it.”
    “Naw, this mutt who done Sister every which way—”
    “Spare me the details, Sergeant.”
    “Anyways, this mutt, he cuts off her hand and takes it with him. Like maybe it’s some kind of sick-assed trophy.” I ached for a drink. I could have gone back inside the house, bellied up to the bar, told the man to line them up. Nobody could have blamed me, not Father Decian, not even Ruby.
    “Was it the left hand? The one with the gold band?”
    “You think I don’t notice that? I'm in the freaking Holy Name Society.”
    “God bless you, Sergeant.”
    “Like I say, this is one freaking sick-assed pervo.” Kowalski took a Three Musketeers candy bar from his coat pocket. I remembered an advertisement in the back of comic books from my youth: a picture of the mustachioed trio of D’Artagnan’s comrades pausing from a daring deed for a snack, under the slogan THREE MUSKETEERS, A CANDY BAR BIG ENOUGH TO SHARE WITH A PAL. Kowalski did not share. He said, “Mind if I ask you something hypothetical?”
    “Yes.