Empties (7 page)

The cop Benek had come in with was handing him something. “It was under the pew,” he said. Benek nodded as he took the woman’s purse, surprised at how pleased he was by the opportunity. “I’ll return it myself,” he said.
 

“Makes no sense,” the cop said.
 

Benek looked around the empty church and felt uneasy. Churches always did that to him, ever since he had stopped going as a boy. It was like visiting a bus station and watching tickets being sold, except that no bus ever came to pick up anyone.
 

Just before he went home that night, Benek took out the contents of another big envelope on his desk and found a news clipping from a Hoboken paper. The small, fourteen point headline above the filler story read:
 

HUMAN BRAIN FOUND ON STREET

The story quoted the cop on the beat, who had investigated two nearby funeral homes and gotten indignant denials that anything was missing from the remains of the dear departed in their care.
 

A note from Gibney read:
 

Bill,

One of my assistants brought this to work with him. Our practical joker strikes again!

Frank
 

He opened a drawer to put away the envelope and looked at Dierdre Matera’s purse. He’d drop it off to her before meeting Gibney for lunch tomorrow, he told himself as he closed the drawer and locked it, then sat back, wondering about his feelings for her. They simply came. Near sleep that night they put on an erotic siren show, which he tried to ignore, feeling like a fool.
 

6

At eleven the next morning he was a peasant calling on a great lady. She would reward him or not for the return of her purse. He was not especially conscious of his fear of women, but he recalled the one in high school who kept questioning about what he was going to do with his life as if interviewing him for the position of worthy husband and father. Another, in the midst of a heavy make out session, unzipped her pants and whispered to him, “I don’t know what’s right anymore,” and he had glimpsed the abyss before him, as all the roads away from it disappeared. Surrender to the male suddenly seemed all too brief, the sweet thrall replaced by its true purpose. The preying mantis bit off the male’s head as soon as the genetic deposit was made, turning him into an immediate source of food. Among human beings it was called divorce and alimony, he had heard said, with child support being a kind of continuing deposit.
 

He pressed the bell, imagining the texture of her skin beneath the suit she had worn at the church, and was surprised by her bare image, as vivid in his mind as if he had seen it.
 

“Who is it?” she answered over the speaker. Her voice sounded pleasant, suggesting a mood very different from that of their first meeting, and he felt stupidly hopeful.
 

“Detective Benek. You left your purse at the church.”
 

“Oh, yes! I’ve been looking for it. Come inside.”
 

The door buzzed open. He went through and down the hallway. She opened the inner door and stood aside as he came in.
 

“How silly of me,” she said, smiling. “I’d completely forgotten I had it with me! I’d put my keys in my pocket—I was just going for a walk. Must have also picked up my purse when I didn’t have to.”
 

Looking well rested, she seemed to have recovered from her collapse at the church, Benek noted as she closed the door and faced him. “Come sit down,” she said as if she had overheard his thoughts and decided how he should feel about her.
 

She led him into the small living room at the back of the apartment. He sat down in one of the two high-backed chairs by the windows, and glanced out at the slate-covered backyard. “Can I get you a beer?” she asked, looking lovely with her hair down to her shoulders.
 

“I’m on duty,” he said. “A Coke will be fine.”
 

She smiled and turned away. He examined her as she went into the kitchen, noticing that she seemed heavier in slacks than he had imagined, then looked away before she could catch him at it. Out in the yard a gust of wind swept dust across the black tiles. He noticed a blotch on the tall, wooden fence separating the yard from its neighbor. The stain looked as if someone had struck the wood with something greasy.
 

He turned back to the living room. The chairs were upholstered in a light brown fabric. The walls were off-white, the room tidy and clean, unmarked by any of the daily debris of life. Except for the old-fashioned, oversized sofa with its pattern of yellow flowers, it seemed an oddly impersonal room.
 

She came back with the cola and a small bowl of cheese twists. “Hope you like these,” she said, placing them on the end table. “Would you like a glass? It’s the least I can do for getting my purse back.”
 

“Don’t bother.” He grimaced inwardly; her looks and manner did not go with junk food. He took a sip from the bottle and said, “I hate to bring this up, but can you recall anything else about what happened at the church?”
 

She sat down carefully in the chair across from him, by the far window. “I was too far back to see much. What did happen?” She crossed her legs and leaned back, and he felt that despite her bouncy manner she was completely in control of herself.
 

“They say that someone threw something, and that the priest may have had a stroke or a heart attack. No one’s been able to describe the person who threw the... stuff over the altar rail.”
 

“Who could have done such a thing?”
 

“Looked like garbage from a butcher shop. Cow’s brains maybe.”
 

“I remember feeling dizzy.” She glanced at the cheese twists as if annoyed that he wasn’t having any.
 

He waited uneasily for her to continue. She smiled as if at his discomfort, then said, “Sounds as though you’re looking for a vandal. I didn’t think the NYPD had the resources to spend time on pranks.” She paused. “Of course, it is sad about the priest. I didn’t really see him become ill, but I wasn’t feeling all that well myself when I went in—I was looking for a place to sit down.” She smiled and looked away from him. “I’m not very religious.”
 

Benek found himself watching her as she spoke, admiring her straight, delicate nose and finely sculpted lips that were just full enough, and he felt like a boy of fourteen faced with a grown woman that he could never have. Finally, he stood up and said, “Thank you for your help. Here’s my card. Please call me if you recall anything more.” He looked at his watch. “I have to hurry to a lunch appointment.”
 

She uncrossed her legs and said, “Thank you for helping me,” then stood up to show him out.
 

“It was routine,” he said, glad that she had forgotten his rudeness to her at their first meeting.
 

He met Gibney on Fiftieth Street. They went into a place called the Ho-Ho Restaurant and were shown to a table under a picture of the Great Wall of China. The place was almost empty after the lunch hour and seemed to belong to another lost city. He tried to recall if this restaurant had once closed, but obviously it was still here; maybe it had closed and reopened.
 

“What you need,” Gibney said, “is a real vacation. On a boat, sailing around for at least a month or two.”
 

Benek smiled. “Is that what you have in mind for yourself?”
 

Gibney nodded. “Been saving up all my life. Sailing along the Florida coast, maybe in the Caribbean—that’s the plan.”
 

“Pirates will get you these days,” Benek replied.
 

Gibney shook his head. “There’s enough safe inland waterways to suit me just fine.”
 

“I can tell it’s your dream.”
 

Gibney nodded. “Just imagine. I’m on my boat, anchored in a cove, asleep below decks. The sun will still be up when I get up and go topside. Put a gun to my head and I’ll tell you it’s what I really want. And it’s not an impossible wish. It’s exactly what I’ll have when I retire about a month from now.”
 

Benek stared at him, thinking that this was the kind of man who should have been his father.
 

“You’re invited,” Gibney added, “to come visit me on the boat.”
 

Benek smiled. “Thanks.”
 

“Of course, I won’t be around when you catch our practical joker. Maybe there’s no one, and all this happens by itself, for reasons we’ll never discover.”
 

They were silent under the photomural of the Great Wall, and Benek thought that Gibney might lose patience with him.
 

“You think I’ll catch him?” Benek asked.
 

“Or them,” Gibney said. “Sure. I’m retiring, so I won’t disagree. You’ll just have to see for yourself. When you do, send me a postcard. Or better still, just come down for a visit.”
 

Benek sighed and nodded.
 

“The lemon chicken here is the best,” Gibney said.
 

“What—did you have it in China?” Benek asked.
 

“No.”
 

It didn’t make a laugh, so Benek smiled and Gibney smiled back.
 

Benek thought of all the frigid dead in their morgue drawers, waiting to be cremated or buried. “Did you start out wanting to be a coroner?” he asked.
 

Gibney chuckled. “Nobody does.” He scratched the back of his neck and sat back. “No, I began with surgery at a hospital. Thought I’d get my own practice. But I wasn’t good with patients, and wasn’t that fast with my fingers, so I washed out of surgery. Can’t make too many mistakes on corpses, and I’m quite good at finding out what made them corpses. I became a coroner after my wife died, fifteen years ago. What do you do for fun?”
 

Benek hesitated, then said, “I read the ancient historians, mostly.”
 

“No kidding?” Gibney said with surprise. “What am I missing?”
 

Benek decided it would take too long and sound too odd to explain the sense of orderly comfort he got from the ancients. Not much had changed with human beings, and what seemed about to be new might be worse. One might hope, and hope makes a man deathless, Melville had said.
 

“History,” Benek said.
 

“Oh, that,” Gibney said. “Our record of repetition and failure. Repetition that is never quite the same and failure that never seems to completely fail. There’s hope in that, son.”
 

“So what about the priest?” Benek asked.
 

“I haven’t done that autopsy yet.” Gibney sighed. “Tonight. What do you expect we’ll find?”
 

Benek sat back in his chair. “Any idea of what was on the floor?”
 

“Calves’ brains, maybe.”
 

“It makes no sense.”
 

Gibney nodded. “So the priest went up into the pulpit with a head full of sermon and keeled over when he saw the bloody garbage hit the floor.”
 

“That simple?” Benek took a deep breath and realized that Gibney was glad to be here with him.
 

“What did Captain Reddy say?” Gibney asked.
 

Benek said, “Wait for the autopsy.”
 

“What did you tell the parish?”
 

“A vandal threw something and the priest died.”
 

“Some dope will say it’s supernatural.”
 

“Sure gives a good imitation,” Benek said as the waiter handed them menus.
 

“I’m not very hungry,” Gibney said. “Bring me a scotch—neat.”
 

“A Coke for me, no ice,” Benek said. The waiter left. “It’s irritating. What was the motive?”
 

“Somebody doesn’t like churches. Somebody doesn’t like priests.”
 

“No one noticed anybody out of the ordinary,” Benek said. “It was a pretty respectable crowd, and most of the people in the church at the time attended regularly. You’d think they would have noticed a crazy.”
 

The coroner shrugged. “People see but do not observe.”
 

The drinks came. Gibney lifted his glass and put it away. “Wish you luck. This one’s on me.”
 

Benek took a sip and realized that he liked the man. And that made two people that he felt good about recently. Three if he counted his new neighbor Carla. His life was looking up.
 

Gibney smiled and said, “So tell me now about these ancient historians you like so much.”