Part Four. The Poor Box Thief
Chapter 75
Sitting in the darkened Holy Name confessional booth, Father Seamus Bennett silently blew his running nose and lifted his Sony minirecorder.
“Poor box stakeout,” he whispered into the microphone. “Day two.”
Sick, my ankle, he thought, sniffling. He’d never been sick a day in his life. Stay in bed? Didn’t Mike know that at his age, lying down was a hazard to be avoided at all costs? Who knew if he’d ever be able to get back up again? Stay on his feet and stay busy, that was the thing.
Besides, he had a parish to run. Not to mention a dastardly poor box thief to collar. It was clear by now that nobody else was going to do it. The overrated NYPD was no help, that was for sure.
Twenty minutes later, he was starting to doze off when he heard a sound – very faint, tentative, a creak that was barely there. Stifling a sneeze, Seamus slowly drew open the confessional’s velvet curtain with his foot.
The noise was coming from the middle aisle’s front door! It was opening an inch at a time. Seamus’s heart rate kicked into overdrive as a human figure, shadowed in the dim glow of the votives, emerged from behind it. He watched, mesmerized, as the thief stopped beside the last pew, stuck his arm up to the shoulder down into the poor box opening, and removed something.
The object was a folder of some kind. So that’s how it had been done, Seamus thought, watching the felon slide coins and a few bills out of the folder into his hand. He’d used a type of retrievable trap that would catch any money dropped in the box. Ingenious. For a poor box robber, he was a true mastermind.
Except for getting caught red-handed, Seamus thought as he removed his shoes and stood quietly. Now for the arrest.
In just his socks, he crept out into the side aisle. He was less than ten feet away from the culprit, approaching silently from behind, when he felt a nasty tingling sensation in his sinuses. It was so fast and powerful that he was helpless to hold it back.
The sneeze that ripped from him sounded like a shotgun blast in the dead silence of the church. The startled figure whirled around violently before bolting for the door. Seamus managed to take two quick steps before his socks slipped out beneath him and he half dove, half fell forward with outstretched arms.
“Gotcha,” he cried, tackling the thief around the waist.
Coins pinged off marble as the two of them struggled. Then suddenly his opponent stopped fighting and started… crying?
Seamus got a firm grip on the back of his shirt, hauled him over to a wall switch, and flipped it on.
He stared in disbelief at what his eyes told him. It was a kid. And not just any kid.
The poor box bandit was Eddie, Mike’s nine-year-old son.
“For the love of God, Eddie. How could you?” Seamus said, heartbroken. “That money goes to buy groceries for the food bank, for poor people who have nothing. But you – you live in a nice apartment with everything you want, and you get an allowance besides. Don’t tell me you’re not old enough to know stealing is wrong.”
“I know,” Eddie said, wiping his teary eyes, with his gaze on the floor. “I just can’t seem to help it. Maybe my real parents were criminals. I think I got bad blood. Thieves’ blood.”
Seamus snorted in outrage. “Thieves’ blood? What a crock.” He shifted his grip to the young man’s ear and marched him toward the door. “Poor Mary Catherine must be worried sick about you. You’re supposed to be home.You’re going to have a thief’s black-and-blue behind once your father hears about this.”
Chapter 76
By the time I got back to the Blanchettes’ on Fifth Avenue, the party had amped up considerably. I heard dance music blaring as I got off the elevator. In the wood-paneled foyer, I was nearly blinded by flashbulbs as spit-shined executive types and their exotic-looking wives got their social register pics taken.
Was being a cop in this town unbelievable, or what? I thought. From an actual bowels-of-hell tenement fire to The Bonfire of the Vanities in ten minutes flat.
The butler had announced that Mr. and Mrs. Blanchette were unable to be present owing to a family emergency but wanted the guests to enjoy themselves. They took him at his word. Glamorously and barely dressed teenage socialites were bumping and grinding in the now dark and strobing party room. I passed a living statue, a transvestite Bettie Page impersonator, a woman in a Vegas showgirl costume, a guy dressed like a bird. I shook my head as he flapped past. Was he the endangered species they were trying to save? No, this event was for a different charity, but I couldn’t remember what.
“Who is your dermatologist?” someone yelled near my ear as I pushed my way through the crush. “These white truffles are so complex yet so simple,” somebody else announced.
I turned as someone clapped me on the shoulder. It was a middle-aged man in a black suit with traces of a suspicious white powder under his nose.
“Hey, I haven’t seen you since the open,” he said. “How was Majorca?”
“Great,” I said, backing away toward the kitchen.
I even spotted one of the New York Times editors who I’d almost arrested, talking with some men in suits out by the pool. Probably deciding what tomorrow’s news would be.
When I finally made it back to my kitchen command corner, I sat for a moment with my forehead pressed against the cool, soothing granite of the counter.
The newest revelation, still ringing through my aching skull, didn’t make sense. How could Thomas Gladstone not be the man we were looking for?
No matter how I put it together, I couldn’t get it to add up. Gladstone gets divorced and loses his job, and then someone else kills his family? And what about the little fact that our eyewitness, the Air France stewardess, ID’d him from a photo lineup? Was she lying? If so, why? Did we need to reinterview her?
I took a break from being baffled to call in to the security detail. Everything seemed normal. No activity on the street. All of the building’s ground-level doors and windows had been checked and rechecked.
“We’ve got it all wired tight,” Steve Reno radioed up from the lobby.
“Like my nerves,” I radioed back.
“Go ahead and have a glass of Cristal, Mikey,” the SWAT lieutenant said. “Or maybe krunk with some of those debutantes. We won’t tell. You gotta do something to relax.”
“Busting a move is tempting,” I called in to my radio. “But fortunately, Steve, all I gotta do is retire.”
Chapter 77
At a different luxury apartment building, the Teacher knelt over the sidewalk grate and started working on it with a crowbar. There were no cops staking out this place, he’d made good and sure of that.
Within five minutes, he was able to swing the grate open. He hopped down inside and silently closed it back over his head. This was a filthy, squalid way of doing things, but if you wanted to get into one of Manhattan ’s Fort Knox-like, prewar buildings, you had to make some sacrifices.
The beam of his penlight, held in his mouth, played over the concrete where he squatted. The filth came up to the ankles of his three-hundred-dollar socks – mounds of cigarette butts and gum wrappers; sodden, unrecognizable garbage; an empty crack vial.
