“We’ll have to go through the transcript carefully once it’s typed up, but nothing that suggested she saw anything except the most obvious parallels to the Haywards’ deaths. She worried about the teenage daughter, mostly. Said the girl is in for a world of pain. But I think we already knew that.”
I’m really not a stress eater, but I found myself reaching for a maple-creme doughnut. I had hoped for something more helpful from the long road trip to Statler. “What about her sister? Heather? Anything interesting emerge from your time in Manhattan?”
“We saw Anne Hathaway-the movie star.” This was Andy.
“Well, that must have made it all worthwhile.”
“She was shopping,” he went on. “Seems to have been visiting some one in the building across the street from Ms. Laurent. I recognized her before Emmet.”
“Good for you, Andy.”
“Well, you asked,” he said, his tone a little hurt.
“Our escort was an NYPD detective named Adrian Christie,” Emmet continued. “He was from Jamaica, and he knew who Heather Laurent was going in. His wife had just read
“What did you think of Heather?”
“She’s pretty. I thought she was actually prettier than her dust jacket. And to go back to your first question: Yes, some interesting things did emerge. First of all, she won’t admit that she and Stephen were lovers, but she is quite clear about this: They are no longer friends. She says that she met him on the Tuesday after the murders-”
“But she was in town that Sunday night. We have records that she had checked in to the Equinox about four- thirty that Sunday afternoon.”
“Doesn’t deny it. Had to be in Albany for a public radio taping Monday morning and an appearance at Bennington College in the evening. It all checks out. She says it was Tuesday when she went to Haverill for the first time, and that was when she met Stephen Drew for the first time. She says their
“Why the breakup?”
“He hadn’t told her that he’d had an affair with Alice Hayward. He only ’fessed up to her after his attorney told him that Alice kept a journal and he was going to have to give us a mouth swab.”
“And this made her mad.”
“Well, it angered her as much as anything can anger her. She’s not a person with what you might call anger- management issues. She’s pretty serene. On the surface she actually comes across as a bit of an airhead-but, in fact, I believe she is very, very smart. She said Drew was more of a son of the morning star than he liked to admit.”
“The ‘Son of the Morning Star’ was George Armstrong Custer,” I said. “He got that nickname because he used to attack at dawn. The Crows gave it to him. I only know that trivia because Paul is a bit of an American-history geek.”
“That’s not what she meant.”
“Too bad.”
“She was referring to Lucifer: Isaiah, chapter fourteen, verse twelve.”
“Satan?”
“A fallen angel. It was Dante and Milton who made him Satan.”
“Emmet, you are a source of unending wonder to me. Have you read Dante and Milton?”
“No. I just did a little research before coming here this morning.”
“So what do you think? Was Heather Laurent involved in some way? You trust her?”
“I think she’s a strange one. But her strangeness moderates against manual strangulation and shooting someone in the head. It moderates against conspiracy.”
“So your money is on Stephen Drew?”
Before he could respond, Andy piped in. “That guy is ice.”
“I take that as an affirmative, Detective Sullivan?”
He nodded. “Emmet and I talked about this on the way home from New York City. Unless George Hayward has a freakishly long arm and was able to hold the gun real far away, we both put our money on the pastor.”
IT IS LARGELY a coincidence that I have the name of a medieval saint from Siena. My Italian mother-whose last name was Brusa-was vaguely aware that there was a St. Catherine, but my great-grandparents had emigrated to Barre, Vermont, in 1901 so my great-grandfather could work in the granite quarries there, and by the time I was born in 1975, my family was deeply Americanized. My great-grandfather was a stone carver, and though he spent the better part of his adult life blasting great blocks of rock from the ground-a job that would, eventually, cause him to die slowly and painfully of silicosis-he nonetheless left behind a poignant legacy in the Hope Cemetery just outside of the town. Three of the most photographed tombstones are his: the little girl nuzzling two sheep that marks the spot where a nine-year-old victim of influenza named Marissa was buried in 1919; the lion with a mane that looks like a halo, his mouth open in a full-throated roar, that sits atop the decomposing body of one of the mayors of Barre; and the graceful young woman on bent knee, her eyes turned up toward the heavens with a look of beatific comfort on her face, who marks the patch of earth where my great-grandmother was buried, far too young, in 1927. Yes, Antonio Benincasa had chiseled the monument for his own wife when she predeceased him. It was, my older relatives insisted when I was a child, one of the world’s truly great, genuinely tragic love affairs.
But by the time I arrived, the granite dust was long gone from the clothes and the lungs of the Benincasas. My father and my grandfather (the one who didn’t edit
And I do feel an undeniable pride in the fact that I am named-if only inadvertently-for a Sienese saint. Although my grandparents never visited their mother and father’s homeland, my parents returned for visits, and so have Paul and I. The year before Marcus was born, we spent two weeks in Tuscany, and while we were in Siena, I felt a bit like a rock star whenever I whipped out my credit card and people saw my name. In some ways St. Catherine was one of those great medieval lunatics: Visions of Christ with his apostles when she was six, scourging herself with an iron chain and fasting as an adolescent, lopping off her gorgeous brown hair as a young woman. Hair shirts. The works. Religious fanaticism at its absolute fourteenth-century best. But she also nursed and buried victims of the plague, had one-on-ones with the city’s most reviled criminals, and talked a pope (whom she called “Papa” or “Daddy” in some of her letters) into putting the papacy back where it belonged. She worked hard for peace among the small Italian republics and fiefdoms. This was not a shabby CV. And she was one hell of a writer-or, as was likely the case, she was capable of dictating one hell of a letter. Let’s not forget that she was a woman in the fourteenth century and one of twenty-four children. Both realities lobbied against literacy. Some biographers believe that she learned to write only at the end of her life. Still, she left behind three hundred letters and
In any case, I have always viewed my name and its connection to St. Catherine as an unexpected, undeserved gift, even if the closest I have come to a religious vision is falling asleep in a catechism class when I was in the fifth grade and dreaming of the sand dunes on Cape Cod. While my work pales compared to hers-you don’t see me nursing neighbors about to succumb to the Black Death or advising the Vatican on policy-I hope that my efforts bring a measure of justice to some of the victims in my small corner of the globe.
When Paul and I were in Tuscany, we went to the San Gimignano Museum of Torture. San Gimignano is a spectacularly beautiful medieval village built on a hill, which pretty much describes seven hundred other villages in Tuscany. If you look at a map of the region, you’ll see that every other village is Montesomething. Paul and I had rented bicycles, and if we’d been a little more energetic in a single day, we could have biked in a circle from Montisi to Montefollonico to Montepulciano to Montalcino and then back to Montisi. The difference between San Gimignano
