The Last Nightingale (17 page)

“Now sir,” Blackburn continued, “here’s the—”

“Friar John.”

“Here’s the thing,” Blackburn persisted. “This boy knows too much about certain kinds of very dark things. I have to see them all the time, but children aren’t supposed to have any experience with them.”

“I hope you are not implying that he was mistreated here!”

“I don’t deal in implying things, sir. The fact is, he knows so much that besides helping me to solve a crime, he has attracted my concern. I want to know where he comes from. I want to know what has happened to him.”

“Since he left, I haven’t the slightest—”

“Why can’t he talk? Why is his stammer so bad?”

“His stammer? Are we talking about the same boy? The Shane Nightingale I know speaks with a perfectly clear voice.”

“Well that’s funny, then, isn’t it? Now he has a stutter that almost shuts him up entirely.”

“And your guess is as good as mine, Sergeant,” Friar John quietly replied.

Vignette wanted to shout. She recognized Friar John’s act. Surely this big cop was too smart to fall for that, wasn’t he?

“I don’t mean to sound harsh, Sergeant,” Friar John smiled, “but I have over a hundred children of all ages here. Some are violent, some are skilled criminals, some are little angels that people just throw away for reasons of their own. Once an orphan is adopted out, they never have to return if they don’t want to. Unless they get arrested. And so I simply don’t have the time to concern myself with them.”

The sergeant then sat very still for a long minute, with Friar John waiting. Finally the sergeant sighed and stood up. “All right, then. But something’s wrong here and I believe I’ll have to follow it up until it’s all sorted out.”

Friar John stood, too. Vignette could tell that he looked relieved. She wondered if the sergeant noticed it. The scene held her attention so well that she nearly forgot to grab her mop and look busy when Friar John escorted the sergeant back into the hall. The friar absently waved her away, then walked the sergeant in the opposite direction.

Around the corner, Vignette dropped her mop and bucket, ran into an empty classroom and scrambled out through one of the windows. She had no way of telling where this was going, but every inch of her tingled with anticipation. Fate had her in its grip, and she was glad of it. It was about time. The job of playing Mary Kathleen had become an unlivable lie.

She sprinted across the grounds and crawled over a side fence while Sergeant Blackburn left by the front door. She knew she could catch him, and this time she intended to follow him until he went home. She needed to know where the big man lived. She could feel events pulling her out of St. Adrian’s for good. Maybe she could sneak back and pick up a few of her things after nightfall, but she could never tolerate living there again. She was certain of nothing but that the life of Mary Kathleen had become a suit of clothing several sizes too small. It would never fit her again.

Tommie was only at the station for a few minutes, keeping out of Lieutenant Moses’ way and overhearing just enough to learn that Sergeant Blackburn was not expected until sometime before midnight. Nobody else seemed to know anything about this Shane Nightingale creature, either.

Despite Tommie’s speed, he arrived back at the morgue to see that the body wagon was already parked out front. He hurried to the canvas door and called inside, “Hello?” He heard a muffled reply and squinted toward the back to see the private standing with a lantern—right beside the infected body. Tommie felt an icy blast hit him inside.

The private waved to Tommie. “Corporal told me to come back here and work with you, make sure everybody gets properly chilled.”

“You’re not serious.”

“That’s what I would have said if I outranked him. Anyhow, I been checking over here to see how you’re doing with it.”

Tommie felt his heart speed up. “Uh, well, I’ve been working slowly. Got a spasm in my back. Makes it hard, lifting.”

The private grinned. “Yeah, my back gets that way every time I lift something, too.”

Tommie hurried over to him, as if to inspect his own work. His heartbeat was not slowing down.

The private gave him a leer that was half conspiratorial and half evil. “You ain’t been in here having your way with the females, have you?”

Tommie gasped in shock at the thought before he could stop himself. He felt the blood drain from his face.

The private burst out laughing. “Relax, mister! I’m just playin’ around. All right, so what do we got here?” The private muttered to himself for a moment while he looked over the body. Then he nodded and turned to Tommie. “I guess I can tell the corporal that you’re slow, but thorough!” He laughed.

Tommie laughed.

A small squeaking sound came from the basin. The private’s laugh drowned it out.

But not the second one.

The private briefly glanced at Tommie, as if Tommie might have made the noise, but just as quickly rejected that and turned to the body instead.

“Um, Private, can you come outside to the fire pit?”

The private ignored him. “You hear that just now?” He fetched the lantern and began to look all around the body basin.

“I was having trouble getting the paper to catch flame, and maybe you could—”

The squeaking repeated.

“There it is again!” the private cried. He leaned in closer to the basin and began to study the shrouds. “Almost sounds like it’s coming from in there. You don’t think some critter’s got trapped in there?”

“No. Of course not! It’s too cold. You know that as well as I do. But if you could come outside for just a minute—”

This time the squeaking went on for several seconds and both men saw the tiny movements from beneath the shrouds. “See?” yelled the triumphant private. He began quickly lifting ice blocks away from the basin.

“No Private!” cried Tommie. “There’s nothing—”

“There is! It’s something all right . . . What the . . . ?” He saw the sliced cloth. “Some idiot done cut into this thing! Who in hell would do that?” He tossed a suspicious glance at Tommie.

The private leaned in close to peer into the opening, just in time to see a tiny pair of rodent eyes glaring back at him, reflecting the lamp’s oil flame. It was the last thing he ever saw before Tommie bashed in the back of his skull with a brick twice the size of his fist.

The private dropped dead in a heap.

Tommie stood inside the pale yellow circle of lantern light, staring down at this new and interesting problem. Finally, he broke the spell that bound him by taking a sharp breath and telling himself
first things first.
He picked up his lunch pail and set it ready with the top open, then reopened the deep cut into the thick shroud. With his gloves still protecting his hands, he quickly reached in and grabbed the rodent behind the head so that it couldn’t bite, then pulled it out and dropped it back into the pail and resealed the top.

With the rat safely captive, he again held the lantern close to the slice in the shrouds and peered inside. The satisfaction brought by the sight that greeted his eyes was almost as good as an orgasm. The body had been stripped of several ounces of flesh by the rat; teeth and claw marks were plain to see. Living death was now his.

But his heart was still beating fast. Oh yes. What to do about the private’s body?

The genius of desperation filled Tommie. He folded the slit in the cloth under itself so that it wasn’t visible, then pulled the private’s body back and lay it against the basin directly behind him. He placed the private’s body face up, as if he had landed after falling backward and hitting his head on the basin’s edge. To complete the picture, Tommie placed a large block of ice on top of him, as if it were in the private’s arms when he fell. He swung the lantern back and forth over the scene a few times, making sure that his improvisation was convincing to the eye. Then, satisfied with that much, he carried the lantern back to the peg by the door and stepped outside.

Nobody was there, nobody approaching. All clear then. So the last thing on his list was to do a bit of acting. Another role to play, and that was fine with him. The emotional flatness of the average adult male was so restrictive and frustrating for him that containing himself in public was like trying to hold back vomit.

His hunger for an audience came naturally. He took off toward the City Hall Station, working on his expression of shock, ready to shout to any and all that the private had lost his balance while showing Tommie how to handle the ice blocks, and suffered a fatal fall. He tried to recall the private’s name and got nothing, but assured himself that such a lapse would be accepted under the circumstances.

It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen!
Tommie reminded himself to say. There was probably something else, but what? Then he got it—
Does the poor man have a wife and children?
Oh yes. People ask that. The rest was simply a matter of reciting his story so thoroughly that nobody could do anything else but believe it.

After the charade was through, he would consider what to do about Shane Nightingale, whose very existence had rudely converted Tommie’s three-day triumph into nothing more than an incomplete aspiration. It galled him to have accidentally left a Nightingale to walk around free. Every moment that this boy continued to exist was and would continue to be a wrenching affront.

Suddenly Tommie realized what that little thing was, tapping at the back of his brain like a relentless woodpecker. It was the memory of Mrs. Nightingale calling out “Shane! Shane!” Since Tommie had never known old man Nightingale’s first name, he had just assumed that “Shane” was it. He barely noticed at the time; the man wasn’t there and his name meant nothing.

But of course she wasn’t calling to her husband, because she knew that he was not there.

She called out to the boy. If she did that because she knew that Shane could somehow hear her, it meant that Shane could have been inside the house. He might have somehow concealed himself, silent and unmoving, while he listened to Tommie slaughter his adoptive family. Listened while Tommie had given of himself so freely during that entire time, so carefully explaining his reasons for each and every stabbing jab, every swiping slice, every twist of the garrote. Young Shane Nightingale had gotten a formal education in the delectable sexuality and moral triumph that there is to be had in properly justified murder. The boy was an intruder, an uninvited witness to Tommie’s deepest secrets.

The smear on Tommie’s work had to be removed. It was a galling mistake that called out for correction. Most important, the correction had to be done in an artful fashion, in some manner that went far beyond the mere expedience of getting away with homicide. This situation, Tommie acknowledged, was one that required his most worthy effort.

A long, screaming poem of a murder.

L
IEUTENANT
M
OSES WAS STANDING
next to the Duty Sergeant’s desk when he saw Blackburn walk into the station. It was only midafternoon.

“Sergeant Blackburn, I would expect you to be home asleep.”

“Yes, sir. I just need to check—”

“You aren’t going to skip work tonight, are you?”

“No. I’ll be on the street by midnight.”

“All right. But I don’t like our men to walk around exhausted, so what do you need here?”

Blackburn lowered his voice. “Actually, what I need is a favor that only you can provide, Lieutenant.”

Moses’heart skipped. He made a conscious effort to repress any show of excitement while he demurred, “I’m sure you give me too much credit.”

“Not at all, sir.” Blackburn dropped his voice to a near whisper. “I need access to personal property records. Specifically, anything at all that we have on the Nightingale family, of the Nightingale Dry Good Consortium, and I need to do it now.”

“The Nightingale family.” Moses looked interested. “That boy in the paper today?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t the story say they were all killed?”

“It did.”

“So the point is . . . ?”

“Sir, I just want to do something for this boy if I can, that’s all. I just want to know some things, such as, was he officially adopted? Did he take the family name legally? Things like that.”

Moses was not the least inclined to help the boy who helped solve the Sullivan murder—a case that wasn’t supposed to be solved at all. Pressure from the widow Sullivan’s high and mighty friends was raining down on him, and he knew that this was just the sort of thing that could get him replaced.

But Moses also knew something that Sergeant Blackburn did not, and that tipped the balance.

“All right,” he sighed as if the favor cost him money. “Go on back and get the Keeper to locate what you want. How long is this going to take?”

“Not long, I guess. Ten minutes?”

“Good. Then you’ll go straight home and get some sleep,
yes
?”

“Yes.”

“Tone of voice, Sergeant—you’re here to ask a favor.”

“Yes, sir.”

Moses had a new trick of pausing before rendering any decision whenever an underling was waiting for an answer. He used it now, allowing Blackburn to twist in the wind for a moment or two before waving him toward the relocated Record Keeping Department.

He had no fear of anything Blackburn might discover in a file that Moses had already cleaned up for inspection. The only sensitive document was the one that Moses had indirectly discovered while he was preparing to interview Mr. Tommie Kimbrough for his morgue work. He had learned within just a couple of minutes that Tommie Kimbrough had a lien against his house on file with the county, and that the lien was held by the owner of the Nightingale Dry Goods Emporium. It seemed that Kimbrough had a huge accumulation of store credit that he had run up over several years’ time, but although Mr. Nightingale won a court judgment months
earlier, he had only recently foreclosed on Kimbrough. Perhaps up until then he had been hoping for payment.

That record, however, was no longer available to the public. It was folded into the inside pocket of the ever baggier uniform jacket belonging to Gregory Moses.